Well, I want to thank you all so much for fasting for me. It’s funny how things worked out this week. It’s like the Lord planned this week especially for me. I know that because of your fasting, I have started to feel that desire and that love come back that I had lost I think a little bit. That proves the power of fasting. I just happened to be reading in Alma 25-30, where it talks about all their missionary times and how it was really hard for them but with patients, they had success. So that got me way pumped too. Alma 26 I think is my favorite chapter. It is so dope how he just goes off like that. And also Elder Raymundo Morales, a seventy I think of the fourth quorum, came down to our stake conference and was amazing. We went to a stake priesthood meeting with him and he was awesome. He chewed out all the bishops here because they are not doing their jobs like they should. Really it is a different world here in Mexico. The church is so much different and hardly organized at all. But Utah is a different world because all of us can walk to the church in three minutes if we want. We have to take two buses and some have to take three or four and a lot of the times they don’t have the money to do it. But yeah, I feel so much better this week and I am trying to focus on the positive.
Yes, there were changes and I am staying here with Elder Cruz and I kind of saw that coming. But I am loving it with Elder Cruz. We joke around all the time and he is really working hard and pushing me to do better. We kind of felt bad this last change because we had been teaching a few people that were not married and they said they wanted to get baptized but it’s not that easy. They have to go back to their own state and get divorced and then they have to wait a year to get married. We had three or four like that. We had to let them go because they were not going to church either. But they really wanted to go, that is the hard thing. They have already received an answer that this is true but they have a whole bunch of problems that really we can’t fix. They don’t have money or time to go back and get divorced and all that crap. So we are looking for people who are married!!! Yesterday we found four people who are going to come with us to church this coming week. One lives by herself, thank goodness, and another couple who were married in the catholic church but they have been together for 11 years so it will be easy to marry them. But yeah, that is the main problem here. Everyone just hooks up like it ain’t no thang. Haha. Oh well, it’s not my choice.
I have come to notice that I can somewhat roll my r´s now!! Yes!!!! Haha. It’s so much fun and I just go around all day erre con erre cigarro. Haha. Thank Señora Hauely.
I read in Alma this week and found some cool things that I want to share with y’all. One part I liked a lot is in Alma 28:11-13. Ammon and all of them had just returned from their mission and there was a big war. All the people were crying because there were many deaths. We read in 11 and 12, it talks about two types of people. In 11 it talks about the people who lost many of their family and they didn’t have the knowledge of the gospel and the plan of salvation. In 12 it talks about the people that lost many of their family too but they had the knowledge of the gospel. They knew that one day they would be able to live with them and see them again. And in 13 it talks about how these two types of people are sooo very different. Really it is amazing how true that is. We have the gospel and this knowledge, and we know that we will be able to see each other after this life. But the majority of the people in this world don’t know that. I loved that and in Alma 24 with the Anti-Nephi-Lehis and how they buried their swords and they repented of their sins and their murdering. We can compare this story to us. What is it that we need to bury in our lives? We can find that one thing that we can bury so that we can become more and more like our Savior, Jesus Christ. And we will know if we have really repented of that sin, if we never take our swords (our sins) out of the ground again to use. That is how we can know if we have truly repented, if we completely turn away from that sin. Really that is how we perfect ourselves. Every time we repent we leave something behind that we will never do again. We move that thing to the list of things not to do. As we do that, the list of things that we are doing wrong will grow smaller and smaller. We work so that we have nothing on that list. We work and repent that the Savior can take his pencil and erase that thing from our list and put it on his. But if we repent and then do it again it's like that sin is written in pen on our list and we can’t erase it. (Alma 24:13) But as we go erasing every little thing we are perfecting ourselves to enter into the kingdom of God. Those are just a few things that I have learned this week and many more things too.
But yeah, I am happy with this change and we are going to give it our all so that we have the success that the Lord knows we can have. I love you all so much and would ask for your prayers and fasting for the people here so that they can soften their hearts and accept us. Actually, not so they can accept us but so that can accept the gospel.
I love you all so very much. Keep up the good work. I will need a report from Ian’s farewell and everything.
Elder Mahas
