Desafiando

Well my beloved fam...Another week away here in the mission and it was packed with a whole bunch of stuff. It’s crazy that it’s already Memorial Day and stuff... hopefully you guys (Zacho) eat my fair share out in Herriman at the Chuckwagon Breakfast! My comp and I had a pretty successful week and learned a lot too, so this is just some of the stuff that happened!

Last week I was able to bless the sacrament for the first time here on the mission. I felt like it was my first time blessing the sacrament when I was 16…but it was seriously the coolest thing ever. I stuttered over a few of the words but ended up doing it well enough and just felt so great because it really doesn’t matter what language the prayer is done in because you can always feel the spirit.

We had some super crazy rainstorms this week and that with tin roof houses makes it literally impossible to teach people. But it gives us the chance to just play games with the investigators so that’s always fun!

We have been bringing a kid that’s 16 to church for the past 5 weeks and he’s been doing pretty well but has always said that he doesn’t really want to be baptized again. So in general we would just drop people like that after awhile but he’s the best friend of one of the members and he’s been going to church so we just didn’t really want to drop him. So I literally taught him every single lesson possible about a second baptism, about getting the Holy Ghost, the priesthood, and just like everything possible to convince him to get baptized again. But every time he would just say ‘I just don’t really want to get baptized again, sorry’... so anyway on Friday we were teaching him and focused on desafiando... or just like working around the problem until you find the actual problem. We invited him, César, to baptism like a billion times and just did everything to convince him to accept a baptism date and like an hour later he’s just like shaking and says...’It’s because I HATE water and never want to enter in it again because I’m scared.’ WOW did I feel dumb. The whole time he had been saying he didn’t want to get baptized again was just because he didn’t feel good about actually doing the ordinance again is all. The whole time I was teaching him stuff that didn’t even matter to him and it was just that he doesn’t like water. Boy oh boy did I feel dumb, haha, but at least now we can figure everything out and hopefully he can get baptized this change!

Also this week we brought a teen to church named Adrian whose parents died two years ago and is now living with his uncle. He has had problems with robbing people and finally opened up to us and shared with us his problems that he had been facing. It was so sweet to see the real desire he has to change and stop doing all the bad things he had done in the past. He’s now preparing to be baptized because he knows that he has sins and needs a baptism to be clean. The rest of my baptisms I’ve had weren’t people that had really been doing bad things in the past so this is the first time I’ve been teaching someone who will get baptized with a total change of heart and with true desires to follow Christ in his life. If everything goes well he will be baptized this coming change! It’s so awesome to be an instrument in the Lord’s hands and help others repent and change so they can be worthy to do the ordinances they need to return to our Heavenly Father!

That’s all for the week folks. Love you lots. Be Obedient. Love your neighbor. Read your BofM and life will be good! See ya next week.

Elder Crump

Hna Tadeo sent this petate to Matthew from Pushtan-
He uses it to do his exercises on.

Rain on a hot tin roof.
It's hard to teach during these storms.

With the Buena Vista Branch President and his wife.

Umbrellas donated by an investigator :0)