Mother's Day

Man, it was so good seeing all of you yesterday. Everyone has changed so much. Caleb and Isaac just keep looking older and older and Enoch is just someone completely different. It was great seeing you all. And Austin! What a surprise! He looks like he´s doing great. I can´t wait to catch up a little more with him and talk more about the mission. I hope you all had a great Mother´s day! I can´t really think of anything super exciting that happened this week. Like I told you all, we´re working with with a kid right now who understands everything well and has already got an answer that what we´ve been sharing with him is true so all that he´s lacking is to go to church a couple times. But we´re getting super close with him. We´re also working with the husband of a long time member and we had a pretty cool lesson right before I talked to you all last night. He has a lot of desires to know if it´s true but as of now he hasn´t been able to really get a direct answer so we´re going to work a lot with him on how to recognize the spirit. We went over Alma 32 with him and helped him recognize that his "seed" has grown since the first time he met the missionaries until now. We´re also the first missionaries that he´s told about his smoking problem so we´re going to start working with him on that so that he can feel the spirit more. One other person that we´re working with is an 8 year old whose mom is a member and whose dad isn´t present so we´re trying to teach her everything she needs to know to get baptized. I say trying because it´s super hard to help her understand things. The other day we were trying to teach her what a prophet is. At first we tried saying the prophet was like a weather man. He can warn us of things we can´t know beforehand for ourselves. If it´s going to be cold he´ll tell us to wear a coat, but it´s up to us if we´re going to follow his advice or not. But, if we don´t listen we´ll most likely get sick. A prophet also can see things beforehand that we can´t and he´ll also tell us what we need to do to be safe but it´s up to us if we´re going to follow him. I thought that was a pretty ingenius way of explaining it but when we went back for the second time we realized she hadn´t learned anything at all. So we tried explaining it like a teacher in school who helps us understand things we´re trying to learn. But she couldn´t even answer simple questions like, "Would we learn anything in school without a teacher?". So we moved to another method. My companion tried relating it to a game. "Let´s pretend the otherside of the room is heaven, and you want to get there. What´s the other side of the room?" "Heaven" "Good. But, you can´t get to the other side because the floor is lava. I´m going to be a prophet. Can you get to the other side of the room by yourself? "Yeah" "No, you can´t because it´s lava, remember?" "Oh yeah, that´s right." "Ok, now, every tile I step on, turns from lava into rocks. So the only way you can get to the other side of the room is by following me. Who am I? "Umm, I don´t know" "I´m a prophet, remember?" "Yeah" "What the other side of the room?" "Ummm, I don´t know." I seriously could not believe it. I felt like there was a hidden camera somewhere and someone hiding behind the curtain that was going to come out and tell us it was all a joke. It was so comical. We tried everything we could think of to try and help her understand. But even simple questions like, "A prophet teaches us. What does a prophet do?" didn´t get a right answer. I have no idea what we´re going to do to help her but I don´t think she understand symbolism at all. haha. I know it might be a bit mean but I seriously felt like I was teaching a brick. I think Noah easily understands the concept better than her. So that´s going to be a little adventure this week. Well family, I hope you all have a fantastic week. With all the love of a dinousaur, Elder Lounsbury