The spiritual thought I love doing!! and thanks for your prayers. They made this week possible. It was a rough but still amazing week. I'm glad the newspaper worked too!! The lady at the place wrapped it for me and I'm glad Hannah is excited to use it!:) Thanks so much for your testimonies!! So this week was interesting. It started off pretty good and then remember Andres? and how he was going to be baptized next week? Yeah, so we had a lesson with him in the place he actually lives. We have taught him at his parents house (when we say house we mean piso 'cause nobody lives in houses) but it turns out he actually lives in this little tiny motor home type thing. We got there and he was like burning incense and had a sword and all these crosses everywhere and all this weird stuff in it. and he had these rings with these symbols on it and we talk about Freemasons all the time. Elder Gentry asks Andres are you a Freemason? and at first i was like are you insane? but it turned out to be a very inspired question. He never answered the Freemason question but he explained he is a Templario (Templar in English, I think?) and he basically told us he doesn't believe in God and believes in reincarnation and all this stuff and we were blown away. He had been keeping his commitments and everything. He'd been reading, praying and we had soo many lessons with him. We thought he was ready but it turns out he doesn't believe in God. Well, he knows all the options of what he could believe in and he kind of has beliefs but he doesn't believe in God and doesn't want to believe. We talked with him for a while and we are still confused on why he agreed to baptism and we are so confused at whenever we asked do you have questions? He said yeah and he'd never really ask them. I guess he just wanted to research another religion and just see what else was out there. The whole agreeing to baptism is what confuses me. So we challenged him to read and pray and he basically told us no and he was like I'm glad we could exchange all this knowledge and we haven't been able to visit with him since. It was the loneliest and hardest night. We weren't sure what happened and we did everything we could to just keep smiling and have fun cause that was hard. Good thing it was just an odd day and everything that happened was funny, but it was still hard. We decided we need more investigators since he was our only progressing investigator. So we prayed and prayed and prayed to have the Lord put prepared people in our path and we ended up teaching 30 lessons this week!! (the most we've taught previous this transfer was 20) and we found 8 new investigators! One we have (we found him in the area book) his name is Ciro. He's from Peru and he is definitely ready and has desires to change. Our good friend Ciro, has a baptismal date for the 15th of march!!!!!!:) The Lord answers prayers when we are obedient:) It was a hard week but this week truly was a miracle:)
For the spiritual thought for the week! The Book of Mormon has one purpose - to testify of Christ. To go along with that there are two main themes in the book of Mormon. Remember and Repent. Our missionary purpose and also lesson 3 in Preach My Gospel have 5 steps. Faith, Repentance, Baptism, Holy Ghost and Endure to the End. This is the gospel of Jesus Christ. When we read the book of Mormon it is constantly reminding us to Remember and Repent. We are on step 5 of the the 5 steps, we are Enduring to the End, which include the first 4 in a repeated process over and over again. We must always remember our Savior and have faith in him, repent daily, and as we renew our covenants every Sunday we covenant to remember and we can be cleansed of sin, and then we have the Holy Ghost to help us. Step 5 is a combination of the repeated process of the first 4 and the "guidebook" (if you will) on how to live the right way and stay on the path is the Book of Mormon. Its themes are Remember and Repent, and look to the Savior. As we feast on the Book of Mormon daily and we choose to apply the things therein we are helping ourselves repeat the process of the 4 steps and the only way to stay on the right path with these steps is through daily study of the Book of Mormon. This church is true and the Book of Mormon is the way to come unto Christ!!!! I love you all!! Have an amazing week!
Love,
Elder Anderson
¡El Reino de Dios o nada!
