March 3, 2014

Hey family,

Wow! it is really late- got to get going.... but I will write a little anyway.

This week has been absolutely crazy, We had almost no success. The whole week everything seemed to fall through. I was tired and just felt like I was wasting my time. We walked around, knocked a bunch of doors and got rejected quite a few times.

One day I just knelt down and prayed. I prayed for what seemed forever and we continued to work. Wow, from about Wednesday and on, everything thing seemed to change. We found two or more people to teach everyday. We found families, we made baptismal dates. We even had some of our investigators in church this Sunday, tell us and other members, that they want to be baptized.

This week has been amazing and we have started to have so much success! The Lord truly does bless us after the trial of our faith or the transfer of our faith.

We are working right now with a member whose name is Joel. I will get pictures for you this week, but he is amazing. He has such a strong testimony and his family doesn't want to hear it. His family has continually rejected the church no matter what we do, so we stopped working with him. Then one day we got to the church and Joel was there, with another man, we thought it was a member; turns out it was his nephew Carlos and he is now going to be baptized the 23rd. Then the next day he asked if we could go visit his brother, so we told him sure. Well, we are working with them to put a date for the 30th to be baptized. It is amazing how much Joel wants to work and how much the gospel has changed his life. I will have to write a whole other email just about him.

Then we found, well our neighbor came up to us and asked if she can learn more about the church and she will probably be baptized the 23rd or 30th as well.

Well the point of all this is that the Lord challenges us, but in the end will always help us fulfill our purpose if we continue to work and do as he asks.

Also, I was reading the other day in Alma in Spanish and I just finished Alma, but something that caught my attention was when Moroni wrote a letter to the governor Pahoran and how Pahoran answered because, well Moroni didn't write very nice words, he wrote what he felt was right and just, but did not understand the whole situation. But Pahoran, how he responds, really got to me and made me think about the way I respond to people when they are angry and when they don't understand. Then I thought about how I respond to trials and what I learn from them. Well, my new goal for this week is to respond more like Pahoran did, humbly, and trying to learn from what the Lord or other people are telling me.

This week, Sunday was the best day out of all of them. I watched as Victor, a youth in our ward walked into sacrament and sat down with his dad the smile and the spirit that he brought and the change in ones' character that has truly repented, reminds me of the spirit that Ammon and his brothers and Alma had as well.

Well sorry this letter is all over the place, but congrats Mia on your baptism and Samuel on winning cupcake wars even though I have not seen any pictures of either of these events, that's ok .

Love you all have a great week. I pray for everyone of you.

Elder Monsivais