Well week three is over here in Mexico. We had a baptism this Saturday
that went really well, and Elder Christiansen of the presidency of the
seventy came to talk to us.
- Talk to everyone, EVERYONE.
- You need to be able to say "today is the hardest I have ever worked, every day."
- If you use your prep hours in the morning to their full potential your lessons will reach their full potential as well.
He had lots more to say and I wrote it all in my notebook that I
don't have with me right now so this is all I remember, haha my bad.
I
gotta say it freaking hard not being able to really talk to people
here, a foriegn language barrier is harder than I ever thought it would
be. Haha I talked to some of the other white elders here about it and
they all said it took them anywhere from 4-6 months to really get it
down. Every day they would go home discouraged those first couple months
and just pray "why am I in Mexico Lord? I would be so much better if I
could just speak english." I have felt that same way for three weeks and
am now going to try and beat all their streaks. I'm going to try my hardest to be fluent in 3 months. Be able to teach
every lesson and try to understand within 90 days. I have been praying
for the gift of tongues a lot and looking up gifts and I came across
this little revelation -
2 Ne. 25:23 - salvation is a gift to us, it is
by grace we are save, AFTER ALL WE CAN DO. I have been trying to just
focus on listening to people but not really studying or doing anywhere
near all I can do. Ive been expecting the gift of tongues to just come
little by little every day with me just listening to people. I'm sure if I
do this it will eventually get the language but if I truly want the
gift of tongues I need to be doing ALL I CAN. Every spiritual gift is
something that we work toward and then God makes up the rest, this is
the gift. So bottom line I'm going after spanish like there is no
tomorrow and see how Heavenly Father can make up the difference for me. I
know He will.
As far as our investigators we had several cool
experiences this week. First was to two 13 year old kids, that are
little punks. They got this gangster attitude but as soon as they see a
white kid they drop it and immeadiately try to speak english and ask me
all kinds of questions. Haha one of the perks of being in Mexico as a gringo is that your
kind of a novelty so its easier to get people to listen to you. Anyway
we started teaching these two kids about the plan of salvation and it
was crazy, during the lesson their thug attitude left, and I can't
explain it any other way than they became like little kids. Their eyes
changed and you could tell they were really learning and trying to
understand and just wanted to be good. I've never really believed that
whole "the eyes are the windows to the soul" kind of thing until now. I
saw something different in their eyes during the lesson. It was awesome!
They said they wanted to be baptized, We said they can prepare for
March 15 and we wanted to talk to their parents about this message too,
so well be teaching both their families this week. It was awesome.
A second cool experience was we went a house
that we street contacted last week. We knocked and someone inside yelled
something in Spanish that I didnt catch. The door opened and this a guy
with tattoos and a wife beater came to the door. He laughed and said we
could come in, and I was thinking well shoot I guess were going to
waste some time trying to teach this guy. I was dead wrong. We started by introducing ourselves and asked if
we could start the lesson with a prayer....and this 35 year old thug
started to cry...I was floored.... Hes been wanting to be good with the
Lord for a long time, and you could tell he wanted to learn and was
ready. We taught The Gospel of Jesus Christ lesson and commited him and
his son to baptism.You cant make judgements because honestly by looking
at this guy I was expecting him to not believe in God, and just let us
come in to make fun of us but nope, from the minute we asked if he
wanted to pray he was humbled and ready to learn.
As I write these two stories I'm amazed with how much
the Lord blessed us. We really didn't do anything all that miraculous
but the Holy Ghost worked on these investigators and our message was
enough to help them. I just remembered something else Elder Christiansen
said during his talk "The Lord could do this work without us, He could
send angels or signs or whatever He needed to, to show that this is the
true gospel, He calls us for our benefit." I'm so grateful I had these experiences this week and hope to get
it done this next week with both Spanish and more Investigators!
One last story about this week. We had a
Jehovah's Witness come knocking on our door one morning and start talking
about how our church was wrong. ¨Where is Joseph Smith prophesied about
in the Bible?" she kept saying over and over. We tried to show her
several points in the bible that prophesied about the restoration but
she wasnt gonna listen. She kept talking over us and trying to argue.
After about 5 minutes we just shook her hand and shut the door. This
just kind of gives me a testimony of LDS missionary work. That lady was
all about starting a religious fight with us that honestly would´ve gone
no where and everyone would have left angry. I know that we as
missionaries aren't perfect but we don't start yelling that your faith is
wrong and try to tear down your prior beliefs, only to add to the faith
you already have. It also gave me a reason to think about the
restoration more, so I'm going to be studying that over the next couple
of days.
Elder Roberts
Two talks about Grace and the gifts of God to His children.
