Bolivia, Jardin—Week 12



Dear Family and Friends,

 

I can’t believe how fast the weeks fly by. I hope you all had a great week. Mine was just full of activities, finding (mostly older) people, teaching, and learning lots. We are working really hard with all the youth now to get at least a few from the ward excited about doing missionary work. It’s hard for the people here to understand that we don’t and can’t do all the work, but poco a poco they will learn and hopefully sooner than later.

 

I truly love this work. I love seeing the people change when they truly accept our messages. It’s extremely hard to find people who are interested, but at least there are a few. All I know is that we are planting a lot of seeds that other missionaries will have the opportunity to rescue and baptize.

For any of you who are having a hard time in your life, go out and serve! You don’t have to be a full-time missionary to share the Gospel. Something that has really made an impact in my missionary service is a phrase that Elder Uceda told us a few weeks ago, “Hablar no es Ensenar” (or in English, “Talking is not teaching.” We need to teach through our example and service to others. So, that’s what we are doing here. We are teaching through example and service.

I love you all so much and hope you have a fantastic week!

xoxo Hermana Nelson

P.S. I found Stephanie (Amanda’s cousin) in the Liahona (New Era) this month!! Crazy! I was freaking out in church and showing everyone.

Journal Pages
Service, Open House, Talent Show
The Elders came to our chapel this morning to help us set up for the activity we had this afternoon. We move all of the benches and such so we could have an Open House and Talent Show. Then we practiced our “talent” that we presented tonight.

So after about 2 months of planning, we finally had our activity. We didn’t have as many people show up as we would’ve liked, but the members came and helped tons. We went with all of the youth as well and knocked doors and invited people to the activity (with little success, but at least the YM/YW were able to do a little missionary work).

 

Our “talent” was ridiculous, but everything turned out really well. Now I just hope the members are excited enough to continue planning activities which will help the ward grow and become stronger.

Reference
We went to contact a reference from the Bishop today. She’s separated from her husband and has two kids. She immediately opened up to us and told us her whole story. She’s really sad and is trying to find some happiness in her life. She told us that she visited the church a while ago and that she likes it a lot. She is super motivated to do everything to find out if the church is true. Yippee!

Festimoba
Today we went to the Stake Dance Festival. They all dance one cultural dance and the Stake watches and cheers them on. We couldn’t watch Jardin, but we were able to see a few of the others. I miss dancing . . .

Teaching
We were searching through old investigator records today and found “M.” He is 84 years old, lives alone, and studies religion daily. He has books & books & books about the second coming, the Bible, etc. We visited him today and it was very interesting. He didn’t really let us get a word in, but we found out a lot about his beliefs. He said that he read the Book of Mormon and prayed, but hasn’t received an answer quite yet. We have another appointment with him this week, so we will see how it goes.

We had a hard time finding anyone else who wanted to listen to us today because they were all watching intently the game between Argentina and the Netherlands (Argentina won). We were able to visit Israel’s mom and she is super sweet. We have plans to teach her this week, so maybe she’ll open up and let him receive the lessons again.