Ok so, you might not have noticed, but you didnt get an email on Monday lol. Nothing happened, Im totally fine, they just changed our Pday for this week. We had changes on Wednesday, so if you got transferred to a different area, they moved our Pdays to today so we could buy food in the new area and stuff. Sorry mom, I know you were worried all week haha. All is well :). With changes, nothing happened with Elder Ganga and I. We`re both still here, neither of us got transferred. The way transfers work is that you find out that morning whether or not you`ll be leaving. If you are, you take a bus to Asunción and then find out where you`ll be going, and then you go haha. One elder in our district finished his mission so he went home yesterday and one other got transferred to a new area.
We`ll have our next Pday on Monday as usual, so don`t fret haha. On Monday, I`ll tell you whats going on with being able to call home and how we`re going to do it. I`m way excited for that!
Ok, so I call this edition of my weekly newsletter "Miracles of My Mission" because theres some pretty cool stuff that has happened.
This area is divided into kilometers. There is one main international route, and the rest is side streets. We take busses to the kilometer we will be working in, and walk from there. But after 8 or so, there aren`t any more busses, so if we`re working in kilometer 11 or 12 at the end of the day, we have to walk back to the far end of kilometer 9. We`ve been late because of this once or twice. But there have been 3 seperate occasions where we had really rough long days, and when we were walking home at night from kilometer 11 or 12 after the busses had stopped coming. One time, there was a bus just waiting on the street, so we ran for it and made it, so we got to take that bus home. Another time, we were about 1/4 of the way home from kilometer 11, and a van stopped by the side of the road and drove us to our house. Sounds dangerous, but they were members and we recognized their last names from the list of members in the area so we thought it was alright. Everything turned out just fine. And then this past week, we were in kilometer 10, but about 2 kilometers into the area away from the route where we walk home. We finished dinner with this member family, and then had to run home because dinner took longer than we expected. Running this far is tough even for a missionary who walks every day lol. A taxi pulled up beside us and asked where we were going. We told him, and he said he would take us. We said we didn´t have money (taxis are reeeally expensive here), but he said get in anyway it was alright. 3 times the Lord has provided for us when we needed it. He looks after His missionaries.
The other miracles of my mission thus far have to do with people we`re teaching. I`ll start with a lady named Eli Centurion. I may have told you about her before. Her 3 kids are members (1 is a return missionary) and she has been going to church for some 8 years now, but she can`t get baptized because she isn´t married. She´s living in the house with the father of her kids and has been for years and years, but he doesn´t want to get married. We have been praying and fasting for her, and she has been praying and fasting too. We visited her this past week like usual, and she said that he has done a 180 turnaround in a week. He rarely drinks anymore, whereas he was drunk every night before. He is much more easy-going whereas he was very standoff-ish and ill-tempered before. He said they can get married. What a miracle that is. Eli wants so badly to get baptized but never was able to without leaving her house and splitting up the family (you can´t get baptized if you´re living with someone of the opposite sex as a couple), and now out of nowhere this man has totally turned around seemingly spontaneously. That is incredible to me.
The other girl we´re teaching is named Lorena. She is 17, and she has a lot of cousins and relatives in the church. She was talking to the missionaries before this area got closed down, and now that it´s reopened, Elder Ganga and I recently started teaching her last month. She understood everything and it all seemed well, but she still didn´t want to get baptized. She lost one of her legs from the knee down in a motorcycle accident and has a prosthetic. It is hard for her to walk and get around sometimes, but she is learning quickly. Anyway, we had
invited her to be baptized in our last visit, and to pray to know the truth like it says in Moroni 10:3-5. She said no for various reasons, and we were going to tell her yesterday that we were going to leave our phone number and if she wanted to continue learning she could call us. We were going to drop her, she wasn´t progressing. But yesterday when we got there, we asked one last time if she had prayed. She got kind of quiet, and said she had. We asked if she got an answer, if she felt anything specific. She said she got an answer, but she couldn´t explain it. We read Galatians 5:22-23 with her, which talks about the feelings you feel when you feel the Holy Ghost. She said that was what she had felt, and we explained to her that what she had felt was the influence of the Holy Ghost telling her that what she prayed about was true and that Heavenly Father had answered her prayer. She thought for a moment, and then she told us that she knew what we were teaching was true. She now wants to be baptized - not quite right now, but nonetheless wants to be baptized. How incredible is that? There is a promise in the Book of Mormon, in Moroni 10:3-5 that says pray to know the truth. She took that promise to heart, did it, and got an answer. How simple? We don´t have to do anything crazy or fancy to know the truth of things for ourselves. We just need to ask God, and He will answer us just like He promises, just like He did for Lorena.
There is another one that is even more incredible, but I´m out of time. I´ll tell you in my letter on Monday. Its about what happened when we went to find the house of a lady we had contacted 3 weeks ago, named Ramona Lopez. The story is incredible, I still don´t really understand it. You´ll see when I write it on Monday.
Anyway, I hope you weren´t too worried that you didn´t get an email Monday. I hope that you enjoyed the stories as well. This is the essence of missionary work.
I have my camera cord now as well! I can´t attatch pictures in a folder though, I have to do them one by one. Aye aye aye. On Monday I´ll do that. Love you all!
Love,
Elder Moore
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