Helaman's Mighty Men . . .: For the Love of the People...

Well folks back in the good ole USA. Another week has passed by down here in the misión. Times a flyin’ by! I had an up and down week but of course I learned a lot as well.

First off, I had a nice experience this week teaching a…well family I suppose. We are teaching a guy who is seriously like 70 and this girl that’s like 30 and I asked the lady how her grandpa was doing that was seated right next to her. And she’s like, “Well....we are married.” It was terrible. Luckily they thought my Spanish just sucked and brushed it off, but still. It was so embarrassing. People here seriously marry at whatever age they want. We see teenage boys with ladies that have to be at least 40... Welcome to El Salvador.

The rainy season is finally over here and the weather is seriously like perfect right now. But occasionally I do miss the days when my comp and I could run through rivers in the streets, singing random hymns in a Spanish-English mix, while everybody else is just looking at us like we are insane.

Thursday I woke up in the morning super, super sick and couldn’t sleep at all. I had a fever, tons of body pains was throwing up and had diarrhea. It was great. So for the morning I just sat around and groaned. We tried to teach lessons in the afternoon but I pretty much died after teaching two lessons so we went back to the house. That night I realized that for some reason I had yet to ask for a blessing. I’m not really sure why it took me an entire day to realize that. Probably because I’m like, literally, never sick - who knows. But the next morning I got a blessing from Elder Galicia, the Elder that works in Ciudad Real as well. It was really sweet and the Spirit was definitely there. I pretty much felt totally better after that and worked normal the rest of the day. It was HQ stuff, as my brother would say. I really look up to Elder Galicia a lot too. He’s such a hard worker and always has the Spirit.

My dearest Sister wrote me a letter this week and I really liked a ton of the stuff she said in it, but one thing I especially liked was that sometimes she struggled to get out of bed to work each morning, but if we really have a perfect love for the people it shouldn’t be that hard. She said if it was me that she was going to wake up to teach, she would be up, ready and out the door in as little time as possible. But out on the mission it isn’t so easy because we don’t naturally love the people we are serving. It really made me think, yet again, about the love I have for the people of El Salvador and what I need to do to continue to get more love.

Tying into loving the people is a story of yesterday and going to church. We were going around right before sacrament meeting gathering up all of the less actives around the área we were in. We passed by an older guy in a wheelchair that usually goes to church but hasn’t been going in a while. We asked why and he’s just like, “Well nobody comes to get me.” Soooo we told him we will change that next week but this week we will take you. The only thing is that usually he goes in the back of a pickup. But we didn’t have a pickup. So we pushed him. And boy was that fun. His house is like two miles from the church and the roads are anything but normal. You bet we arrived 30 minutes late to church, sweating like nobody’s business!! It was a really interesting experience and the whole time I was just thinking that if this was my Grandma or Grandpa I would do it in a heartbeat. I feel like it will be the same throughout my entire mission. Everything hard I do would be a lot easier if I was doing it for someone really close to me like my family or friends. So I just need to develop the love that I have for my family, for the people here. Who knows if all that made sense but it did in my head.

For all you all back at home, if there are people you have a hard time serving, just remember that we are all sons and daughters of God, and so you should serve others with the same attitude and effort as if it was your parents your brothers or your grandparents. It’s hard, but we have to at least try.

That’s all for the week. We didn’t bring a single person to sacrament meeting, which was beyond depressing, but we will try super hard to bring more next week. My Spanish is at a stand still and I’m actually still struggling a lot with it, but it will get better eventually. Hopefully haha. Hope you guys all have a nice fun spiritual week! Love you!!

Elder Crump