A Moment of Silence

Hello hello my family.  It´s always good to hear from and write you all :)

This week has been alright.  My new companion is a little...headstrong, we´ll say haha.  He´s an EXTREMELY hard worker when we´re out of the house, and he knows how to work with the members.  But he is far from obedient, and a bit obnoxious haha.  He complains about everything, oh my goodness.  It´s his way or the highway, and if he doesn´t get it, he gets ticked.  But oh well.  I´m sure we´ll be fine, I get along with just about everybody.  And if it ends up that we don´t get along very well, as long as we work hard and have success than I´m happy with that.  I feel kind of bad for him though.  His mom isn´t really active and neither are his brothers, and his dad isn´t a member.  He never gets letters from his family either.  When he does internet, he writes his brother and President Callan and that´s it.  Poor guy.  I would ask you guys to write him so he has some letters, but nobody knows Spanish to be able to write him haha.  But he´ll be alright, he´s been out for a long time and he´s used to it.  Just keep him in your prayers.

This week, I had kind of a neat experience.  We went with our ward mission leader (Hermano Chaparro) to teach a guy named Alejandro Diaz.  He is a 24 year old guy, real sharp, and knows a lot about the Bible.  We

have taught him various times.  His stumbling block is that he doesn´t believe that a church is necessary to follow God or for salvation.  We´ve taught him a bunch, but with little progress, so we brought our ward mission leader to help because he went through a similar experience before his baptism.

Anyway, when Hermano Chaparro was talking and sharing his conversion story, somebody in the house turned some music on, and it was really loud and distracting.  I was sitting there praying silently but really strongly so that the music would be turned off or turned down (it is very hard to feel the Spirit with Lady Gaga in the background, just so you know).  I was praying and praying and still the music was blaring loud as ever.  I started to doubt and was like "Heavenly Father knows that Alejandro needs to feel the Spirit and he can´t do it with this distraction, why won´t He turn the music down?"  I concluded that He knew what He was doing, and if He didn´t cut the music off, there was a reason for it.  So we kept teaching and teaching, but still with very little progress.  By the end of the lesson, I had forgotten all about the music.  There was a moment where I was testifying right before the last prayer, and we came to a moment of silence.  Did you catch that?  A moment of silence.  There was no music.  At some point during the lesson, the music had been turned off, I just didn´t notice it.

Now, this may seem insignificant, but I´m really glad that I realized that that had happened before I left the lesson.  What would have happened had I not realized that the music had been turned off in the end?  The Spirit is not the only one who whispers in our ear.  Satan is also very keen on that.  "God didn´t answer your prayers, even when they´re to help the salvation of another."  or "You´re not worthy enough for God to answer your prayers." or a million other things that he could have said.  Not that I would have believed any of that, but it would have been true that because of the little progress we made with Alejandro, I could have doubted God´s help in the work.  But I realized that God did answer my prayer.  It´s not that God doesn´t answer prayers.  It´s just that He doesn´t always answer them right away, or that we don´t always recognize the answers.  Seem it small to you, it helped build my faith that the Lord does have His hand in His work and that He does care for His children.  So if you have been praying for something for a while and you think that you haven´t gotten an answer, stop to take a moment of silence.  You´ll realize that God has helped you in a lot of ways that you haven´t recognized.

Love and miss you all.  Until next week!

-Élder Moore
P.S.  Happy Birthday BrookAnn!