Thursday, May 31, 2012

Fajitas and Locro

Alright family, well this week has been pretty dang good. Nothing giant as happened, things are staying pretty quiet but I´ve been enjoying it. The mission is about to make a few changes that are going to be super awesome. I love how inspired our church is haha. They´re about to start making a lot of changes so the stakes and wards are more integrated into the zones and areas of the mission. For example, the baptismal goals we put as missionaries are going to come from colaboration with the bishop, not just us deciding on what they´ll be. Also, our mission president is going to have a meeting with the zone leaders and the stake leaders to coordinate all of our efforts better. There´s a big emphasis on activating families and getting them to the temple, it´s like the key on having the church grow instead of just increase in members. There´s also an emphasis in having all of our investigadores meet members in their homes so they can see how an LDS family lives and how we´re different. At the same time it´ll help the members grow their faith and participate more in missionary work. It´s basically taking what for a long time has pretty much been two seperate works (the responsibility the stake has with members and missionary work) and combining them into one. I´m super excited to see how these changes are going to help, I think it´s going to make a giant difference. I also have recently gained a testimony of companionship inventory haha. Companionship inventory is where we take a couple minutes to talk about if we´re having problems with our companionship and how we can improve things. I have never really done it very often in my mission but we had one today and things were way better after. Things weren´t awful but little things start getting to people after spending every minute of 6 weeks together. I think part of the reason it helps is because when you start telling them the little things that bug you you start seeing how dumb they are haha. In other news, I made some boss fajitas this week. I still had left over fajita seasoning that you guys had sent me like a year ago (but really no joke, I think it was about that long ago) and somehow some of the missionaries found this place where you can buy some pretty hot peppers so I went out on a limb and experimented sticking one of those in the mix and wow, I felt like I was eating in Mexico. I even had some taco bell seasoning (which made me feel a little less in Mexico and a little more in the states) but it was a pretty great mix. Also, this Friday was Revolution´s Day here and it´s a tradition to make this chili-like soup stuff. It´s not very hot at all but it´s kinda the same idea. So our ward had an activity and we were inviting everyone to it this week. A couple less active members went so that was great, but overall it was also great just to see the ward being a little more united. I think we´re starting to make some progress. We´ve talked to people with beliefs of every kind this week. We talked to a super catholic (it´s not unnormal to talk to catholics but usually they just say their catholic and they don´t actually know what the church believes, but this lady knew her stuff), we talked to a super evangelista (which is also pretty normal) but we also talked to this guy who believed in this guy named John the Baptist "Pistolera". Pistolera I think can be translated to something like a gun holster, but basically this guy was a criminal who had killed people and supposedly raised his friend from the dead. He believed that by praying to this guy (I kind of imagine an old western fast-shooter) he started having success in life and now he owns like four apartments. It was super strange and mildly amusing. You don´t come around those kind of people every day, that´s for sure... Last but certainly not least, we only had minimal success with our investigadors. We had three of them committed to chruch but in the end one of them got back early in the morning from hanging out with friends and the other didn´t want to go because he didn´t have the right clothes. When we asked his sister if we could talk to him she said her mom didn´t want to wake him up, so that was kind of a bummer but we had one girl named Valentina who has been twice so she looks like she´s progressing pretty well. She´s the granddaughter of a super strong member so that helps a lot but this week we´re going to try to have a family home evening with her dad and mom to try to get him re activated and her baptized. Welp, thanks for all of the updates! With all the love a red hot chili peper, Elder Lounsbury

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