Keep Praying

You will never guess what happened. On Monday we got told that a senior couple were coming to Talhualilo to help us out and that the Elder has been a branch president 3 times before so he was coming to be branch president. That's right people I am now serving with the mexican version of Grandma and Grandpa Roberts. Haha they are named Elder and Sister P, and to be honest I could not be more happy, the extra responsabilities we had were taking a lot of our time so President Ramos decided to help us out because we are actually having a lot of success with the investigators here. 

 

They will be focusing right now 100% on reactivation and retention. HAha so we spent a lot of the week introducing them to all of the members here in Tlahualilo. HAha I never realized how freaking fast we walk until we had to show the misionary couple around and I would start walking normally and after like 2 minutes I realized they weren't right next to me so I would look back to see where they had wandered off to and I would see two little dots on the horizon trying to keep up....oops...hahah.   

President R. (Mission President), his wife, the district president and like 6 other leaders all came to lil Tlahualilo to sustain and set apart President P., more priesthood than Tlahualilo has seen in....ever...haha. 

We have had really good lessons this week with our investigators and they are all progressing really well. April is looking to be a months of baptisms every week, gotta just keep praying hard and helping out our investigators. God has done so much to help us, when we got here we had nothing, NOTHING. All the other elders told us that being sent to Tlahualilo is like going to outdarkness in the final judgement...hahah yikes, needless to say I was less than thrilled when I showed up. 

 

But after three months of working our hardest, literally there are days when we are running from appointment to appointment, we have 0 time and right now we have 7 investigators with a baptismal date and a lot of others that are listening and changing their lives. We started  lessons with these people hearing how they would never come to our church, how they didn't know how to read so how could they read the Book of Mormon, how the Virgin Maria is more important than Jesus Christ.... and I'm not kidding at this point we can't get to appointments fast enough. 

The Lord really is giving and has given us soo much here in Tlahualilo. Keep Praying

Elder Roberts 

 

 

Changes required to be happy

I don't know how we lucked out to find R. but this man is one of a kind as far as investigators go. I have never had an investigator as easy as him, he does and accepts everything we tell him.

One perfect example, he has been studying with the Jehovah's witnesses for a long time and so he believed, naturally, that Jehovah is our Heavenly Father and prays to Jehovah in the name of Christ. We knew for him to be converted obviously he needed to understand better the Godhead. So we spent a whole lesson on God, Christ, and The Holy Ghost. He was a little confused after the lesson and told us the he believed us but it was hard for him to accept that Christ is Jehovah, so we gave him some homework in the Book of Mormon and the Bible and told him to pray about what we talked about....

In the next lesson he told us he insisted on saying the prayer, and prayed very fervently to our Heavenly Father in the name of Christ. It was so powerful to hear him say a prayer so fervently to his Heavenly Father and the change that he has felt in his life because of it. We also taught him about President Monson this week and the importance of a living prophet, he took one look at the picture of President Monson and asked us if we could print him another copy so he could hang it in his house and told us he can't wait until general conference to hear the words of the prophet of God. He showed up to church this week and told me he can't wait to be baptized and started to cry and told me that he has been waiting to be baptized in the true church for a long time he will do whatever it takes to get baptized.

He dumped his girlfriend after the lesson about Chastity, chucked his coffee after the lesson of the word of wisdom, prays with all his heart to understand and progress, and to top it off invites his friends to listen to us to, but they aren't as interested...haha.

It honestly humbles me to be this mans missionary, there hasn't been a baptism in Tlahualilo in a long time and there have been hundreds of Elders sweeping this area and it just happened to be me and my companion who found this man.

We had four of our investigators show up to church and all 4 will be baptized within a month. Also we had several less active members show up making our attendance more than it has been since I got here. The Lord is blessing us so much as we just work and pray and don't take crap from Satan. Its not to say that he doesn't give us a lot of hard times, but one of the key things in the mission is to learn damage control and trust me when our investigators are progressing if we don't put in the extra effort Satan goes to town, but if we do everything we can Heavenly Father blesses us with the words, and service necessary to save his children.

I have learned so much about God on the mission and about His very real desire to do everything to save His children. We are also teaching a less active member that is an angry, lost 19 year old kid....who does that remind me of.... He tells us all he wants is to be happy and he doesn't understand why God doesn't help him out. He tells us that he doesn't even know what he wants to be happy just he wants to be happy. He doesn't read his scriptures, or pray, and in church he just sits around and plays on his phone, and he asks us where is God.... haha it really is exactly like me.

Where is God? If we don't do anything how can we expect God to solve it all for us? In the mission I have really learned what it means by the faith is action, what it means to be saved by grace after all we can do. God will not do something for us that we can do for ourselves. If all we do is ask God to make it all better and then sit around and wait what can we expect from a God that has given us everything we need to make it back. I really have learned what the gospel can give us, how to progress grace by grace until we reach our potential as children of God, the gospel really is for our happiness, Christ offers us happiness, the trick is for us to learn how to live his gospel.

It's the hardest thing in the world, some days it requires everything I have to just say okay Father, I'll do it, but in the end it really was what I needed.

Cleaning the Font

Preparing the Font-Acting in Faith

This week was crazy. We had the district conference this week so we had to get to try and figure out how to rent a bus to get all the members and investigators from Tlahualilo to Chavez, about an hour away in car. So we called the District President and had to do a DAP, that is take out tithing to use it for purposes of the church, and after an hour and a half got everything ready for the conference. It was actually really cool to get everything together and load up the bus. In total 35 members showed up and our investigator F. We loaded up and headed for Chavez haha.

We also cleaned out the baptismal font this week to show the Lord we are ready for baptisms, and let me tell you it was a sacrifice haha. The baptismal font sits outside the house of prayer without any kind of covering, so it was full of water, mud, garbage, bricks, rocks, bugs, a body (haha, naw but close), and what did we have to clean that sucker out? two buckets and a mop....hahaha I forgot to bring my camera but it was a chore.

F. showed up to the conference before anyone else, showed up right on time and had to sit around and wait until the members decided to get there. He will be such a great disciple of Christ when he is baptized, just gotta get him married haha. 

We also had a lesson with R. to teach him the word of wisdom and when he found out he can't drink coffee, he didn't complain, on the contrary, he thanked us for telling him what the Lord wants him to do and told us the coffee will be chucked out. He couldn't come this Sunday to church because he had to go to another town to fix some stuff with his retirement plan but this Sunday he promised us no matter what he would be at church.  

 

before

 

after

Whom the Lord calls He qualifies.

In a town of 9000 inhabitants called Tlahualilo in the middle of nowhere you will find one dumb, scrawny, white kid wandering around sharing the gospel. And that is who the Lord has put as His branch Presidente until we find a replacement. That's right...I'm not gonna lie, I'm a lil nervous...haha....

Yesterday I got to lead all the meetings, collect tithing, and keep moral high...All in spanish obviously. Haha it is incredible to me how much the Lord has changed me on the mission, and how much more He will continue to mold me until I become what He wants me to be. As I look back it is amazing to see how everything has worked together to put me in this position of service so that I might become a better instrument in my Heavenly Fathers hands. Right now me and my companion are hyperfocusing on the members, because to be honest our job here is to get out of the leadership position and find the local priesthood that are ready and willing to replace us. We have one member that is actually working really hard to become branch president (its his dream I guess...) and he is helping us a lot to gather the Priesthood of Tlahualilo and...well rally the troops...

The member put together a a Priesthood meeting this Saturday to talk about our blessings and responsibilities. He started the meeting and then it was my companion and I's turn. He told us about this meeting the day before so we had very little time to prepare and didn't really know what we were gonna say. As we got up, it was amazing what happened, the Holy Ghost took over as we testified of our blessing and responsibilities as priesthood holders. As we invited all of the local priesthood that have all gone inactive to come back to Christ and do what is necessary to strengthen the branch in Tlahualilo I was filled with strength and with the words I needed, en serio the words just flowed, it was incredible. I felt like one of the men from the book of Mormon as they 'exhorted' their brothers to come back to Christ. Huge lesson this week whom the Lord calls He qualifies. He will give you what you need, just get to work. 

As far as our investigators we had miracles as well. R. is an amazing investigator, he accepts everything we tell him about the gospel without hesitation at this point, after he got over his doubts about Joseph Smith he just accepts and does what the Lord asks. As he told us he has visited a lot of churches but finally is understanding what God really wants from him. For all his life he hasn't been able to get straight answers and after every lesson with us he tells us I AM FINALLY LEARNING. For example he has recited the same prayer every night for the last 60 years of his life. He told us that he has literally not skipped a day in 60 years. As we taught about prayer and the appropriate way to pray and how he can express himself to our Father he dropped his routine prayer then and there and now he prays as though the Lord is in the room and he expresses very heart felt feelings about his deceased wife and his concern for his family. We also taught him about the law of chastity because he thought that only adultery was a sin, so he has some problems with the law of chastity but after the lesson promised us he will stop all of it so he can be baptized. He will be baptized in March. And he showed up to the Priesthood meeting....before any of the priesthood holders.... when this guy is baptized he is gonna show these members how its done....

We also have a story about M. and G., maybe you don't remember them, they are the couple that told us that religion is crap and that there can't be any real religion because all church leaders are corrupt and that it doesn't matter what we say they will never come to our church. M. came to church yesterday BY HER SELF with her new born baby (G. would have come but had to work, but he is going to ask his boss this week if he can switch his day off) and stayed the full three hours. Last night after church they both accepted a baptismal date. Another huge lesson I learned this week PEOPLE CAN CHANGE, THE GOSPEL DOES CHANGE PEOPLE! How can it be that two 20 year old kids with nothing that I would call real experiences in life can help people make huge changes, its because it isn't us, IT'S CHRIST. Jesus Christ called us here to serve in Tlahualilo and although we are facing a lot of trials, the good Lord has put everything in place so we could find the elect and that the elect would hear His gospel. 

Also just to add onto it when people call me on the phone they can't believe I'm not Mexican. I've finally shed the accent! Gift of Tongues! Whom the Lord calls He qualifies. 

Put in the work and don't just accept your circumstances

 

This week was really good until Sunday came around. Haha it's always like that in the mission though, work hard all week and Sunday rolls around and it's time for the investigators to show if they really have the desire to progress, so naturally it's the day Satan goes to town. We didn't have anyone show up to church this week which was really hard because we had A TON of lessons, many of which were really powerful, and we had 5 people on date for baptism and 9 that committed to come, haha so we gotta do more to help them get to church. 

 

F. came after sacrament all dressed up and told us that the members of his old church came looking for him at his house, told him our church wasn't true and practically forced him to come to their church (F. knows our church is true but hates to argue with people so he went along... we gotta be better at supporting our investigators when trials roll around.) He is trying so freaking hard and Satan has to throw trials at him at every turn. Gotta step up our game too then.

 

 

We also found a really cool investigator this week his name is R. He has lived a really good life, grew up with 0 money and so 0 education. When he got married he promised himself and his kids that they weren't gonna grow up the way he did, so he worked his butt off so he could put each of his kids through school and as a result every one of his kids is a successful self sufficient human being. It really is amazing to hear him talk about how he grew up with nothing and how he didn't just accept his circumstances but put in the work and sacrifice necessary to become a better person but more than anything to make his family better people. He lives now in one of the biggest houses in Tlahualilo and the only thing he lacks in life he tells us is God. He doesn't know how to get closer to God and when we knocked on his door he immediately invited us in and asked us how he can bring himself closer to God. It was so cool. 

 

As we talked to him about the restored gospel and the apostasy he cried when we told him that people rejected and killed Christs apostles (haha it was a little uncomfortable but really cool to see that he really was hurt to hear that people killed God´s chosen servants.) He can barely see but insisted that we give him a pamphlet and a Book of Mormon so he could read it.  He has to put them like an inch away from his face so he can see. When we taught him about Joseph Smith it was probably the strongest I have ever felt the Spirit while reciting the first vision, it was really cool. He had doubts at first about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon but little by little he is accepting all of it. By the end of the second lesson we asked him to say the prayer and he started thanking God for sending angels to teaching him the truth and that he felt that he really had finally found the truth, and fervently asking God to help him understand more. It was pretty intense and I might have almost cried when he started talking about angels...haha. He can't show up to church because he cant see and we couldn't go by his house to help him because we had to be in the church early because the District President came again this week to try and figure out what they are gonna do with the branch but this week we will definitely be going by to help him get to church.

As far as the branch, haha we still dont know anything. The District president taught us how to deposit tithing and then told us they would be showing up next week with a mission representative to figure out what they are gonna do. Pray hard!

Happiness verses Comfort

This week we had a very interesting talk with a less active here in Tlahualilo, and its something that applies to me so much. We were talking about happiness and comfort. While we are here on the earth we become beings that are constantly searching for both comfort and happiness and one thing that is very quickly evident is that they are not the same and actually in a lot of cases they are opposites. Before this world we were happy in a very real sense. As we enjoyed the presence of our perfect Father we knew what it was to be happy. Our eternal nature is to become like Him to enjoy such a state of happiness as He does. In the life before we learned from Him how to become like Him and we longed to do so. Satan tried to tempt us into choosing a plan in which it would be impossible to sin but also it would be impossible to progress to the state of our Father.

Luckily our Father protected us from such a plan for all those that chose to follow His. The plan of Satan sounds pretty good at first, not one soul would be lost, but to be forced into obedience and to never progress by our own choices would also mean we would never be exalted either. And so we come into this world but this time with three things we didn't have before, a physical body, the lack of our Fathers physical presence, and without the memory of what we were before. And so here we are, we come into the world as something a lot different than we were, in a physical body and without the presence or memory of Perfect Beings we all of a sudden don't think about eternal happiness and start thinking about immediate comfort. What is eternity for a temporal being?

The natural man that we are in this world doesn't like to be uncomfortable, above all else if the natural man is uncomfortable than automatically we gotta find a something to make us comfortable, at any cost, emotional, physical, mental, and yes spiritual. And so the natural man becomes both an enemy to God and to himself, as he selfishly looks for the things that bring comfort and loses the things that bring happiness.

One huge truth I have learned on the mission is that if the natural man is comfortable, nobody cares if the divine part of us is miserable. I have talked to so many people on this mission that have openly confessed that "Yes I am miserable, but I am comfortable, so why change." It's crazy how easily we settle for the comfortable in place of happiness. How quick we call it quits on God in the minute that He lets us pass through some hard times. We accepted such trials before we came and now that were here we are understanding the price of exaltation - that to truly be happy...we have to be uncomfortable in the natural man sense. Haha and that's hard!

When I started the mission I was the most uncomfortable I have ever been in my life, haha literally nothing was the same, and so the natural man was screaming, and crying and whining and suffering, haha I had fed him for twenty years and now that he had to be starved he wasn't going down without a fight. I so often felt like I was happier before the mission happier before I accepted the Lords will before my own, now a year latter I look back and I realize I was very very comfortable, I had never really done anything I didn't want to do in my life, and here I was having to sacrifice everything for the greater good.

Why did Christ come into the world without any worldly comforts? Why didn't he have a house, or money, or anything in terms of the world? Because He knew what I am learning every day, that to be happy is to be uncomfortable in the natural man, to progress is to starve out the natural man, to deny yourself and do whats gotta be done. One of my favorite teachings of Christ is found in Matthew 10:38-39

 38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

 39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life  for my sake shall find it.

To avoid our the crosses in our lives is the mission of the natural man. To find our own life, pursue our own comfort is what we have come here to overcome. Christ wouldn't have been the Savior unless He was willing to give up everything that is comfortable to the natural man, and sacrifice all that our Father required. He did it, and is our Savior, now we, as disciple of Christ, gotta learn how to do the same, one selfish struggle after another....

The Book of Mormon is true!!

Well to be honest Tlahualilo is a very special area. It's a very small town in the middle of nowhere (rancho in spanish) and in total there are.... 20 active members and none of them show up on time, and like 200 inactive members. The missionaries, and the branch president are the only priesthood in the area so we are in charge of the branch, tithing, activites, reactivation, everything. I also got here and in total we have 4 investigators...so I don't really know what was going on here before but we aren't teaching alot... 

So we gotta change all that. One thing that we are going to change is how we present the Book of Mormon. The majority of the people in Mexico (that have heard anything about the Book of Mormon, which isn't a lot) believe that the Book of Mormon is the mormon bible and we don't believe in the Bible. They also don't realize that we believe in Jesus Christ. In preach my Gospel it says 

"The Book of Mormon, combined with the Spirit, is your most powerful resource in conversion. It is the most correct of any book on the earth (see introduction to the Book of Mormon). It teaches the doctrine of Christ plainly, especially in the lessons you teach investigators. Use it as your main source for teaching the restored gospel."

This is something that we honestly haven't done a lot in my other areas. We use the Book of Mormon as homework for the investigator, as a back up to the lesson, if we don't use it as the main source of our teaching the Spirit can not testify of what we are teaching. The Book of Mormon and the Spirit are everything and if people only view the Book of Mormon as homework than clearly they will not gain a testimony of it and we are not using it nearly to it's full potential to bring people to Christ. So the other night I was praying and thinking about how we can reopen the area and the next day I had a the idea, we would contact with the Book of Mormon (We have never contacted with the Book of Mormon before because when people hear Book of Mormon they all of a sudden have no time to talk) and in the first lesson explain who Christ is, Who God is, and what the Book of Mormon is. We are basically gonna just explain articles of faith 1 and 8 in the first lesson and clearly explain what is the Book of Mormon in the first visit. The Book of Momon is in L1 of preach my gospel but at the end and in this mission we divide the lessons into 2 visits so we don't get around to the Book of Mormon until the second visit and by the end of the second visit almost nobody cares enough to find out whether the book is true. This week we are going to try and change it up here to see how the testimony of the Book of Mormon can help people realize the truth immediately. If we just dedicate a whole lesson to helping people understand who is God the father, Jesus Christ and how the Book of Mormon and the Bible work together to bring us to them I am confident that people will be more receptive to when we get around to things like apostasy and pre-mortal life. So to be honest we are going out of order of the lessons but luckily we have the freedom to do so according to what the Spirit says. 

Also got to see the first presidency's Christmas devotional yesterday and it was pretty awesome. This week was hard because to be honest we have no support from members, we don't have the comforts of the city, life in a rancho is tough and I was in a bad mood because we don't have all of the comforts of civilization. One of the messages in the devotional  was that Christ descended from heaven to be born in a barn, to live life without any modern comforts and to work day in day out without concern for personal needs. Why did He do that? in His own words ´´to do the will of His Father´´. Did I come on the mission to work or to be comfortable? To do the will of my Heavenly Father or my own. It's hard to walk around all day, take cold showers, eat gross food haha, wah wah wah but at the end of the day I and every other missionary have to realize we aren't here to be comfortable, we are here to sacrifice. I have lived in the lap of luxury for 20 years before the mission and its probable that I will do so the rest of my very privileged life, Why should I have to complain that I have to give it all up for a very small time. I learn or relearn something every day. 

2 Challenges 1. Pray that people will be receptive to the Book of Mormon por favor. 2. And read the Book of Mormon and send me your testimony.

Elder Roberts