This week went by really fast. A lady gifted me a ton of shoes, and most of them got soaked in the rain, so they`re drying. This missionary from Honduras almost told me what happens in all of the movies that have came out since I`ve been here, but I escaped. A kid stole my umbrella and then fell straight in the mud. When he was coming out of his house after changing his clothes, he fell again in the same place. My new companion Elder Hoskins is really super funny. He just sees life in a funny way, and lets me know his thoughts. He also is a lot safer than I am, because he served the first year of his mission in some of the most dangerous places in the country, so he really knows how to stay out of trouble. But the most important thing is that we`ve been getting a ton done together, and it feels awesome.
This week we decided to go to the Democracia to help the missionaries who are opening the area. They still really don`t have very many people to teach, so we went to meet some people. When we got there, we said a prayer to be able to find the people who were ready, and then the missionaries there told us which way to go to look. We went in that direction, but we felt like we should go down a specific street. Then we stopped at a specific house in the middle of that street. It just sort of felt like the house. We saw a woman sitting with some chairs in the back, so we just entered the property (without asking permission or anything) and sat down with the woman. We started to talk, and her husband, her daughter, and her grandson came eventually and sat with us too. We started to teach them, and we soon learned that the husband not only is a member of the church, but was once the president of the old branch in La Democracia. He hadn`t been to church in years, but when we told him that his was the first house we had visited, he knew we were sent from God.
Then we met his daughter. Her son had been baptized too, in a place called San Jose Pinula, about a year ago. San Jose Pinula is in the South Mission. One year ago, my companion was in the South Mission, in the exact area where the son was baptized, and he was actually there to see it. He knew all of the missionaries that had taught the boy, and that was really awesome. In that time, I was starting my mission, and I also knew the area because every P-day we had permission to go there to buy food, which nobody else was allowed to do. So my companion is probably the best person in the mission to be meeting them, and I`m probably the second best. We learned that the Mom had never gotten baptized, because she was living with her boyfriend, and he was awful. She asked God what to do, and felt that she needed to leave him and come here. So three months ago, she did...but she hadn`t come to church because she was nervous. When she began to tell her story, she started to cry, because she knew that God had sent us there to find her. The spirit was really strong there, and it was clear that God loves his children a ton. That day we learned that an important role of the Spirit is to be a guide, to lead us to the right paths in our lives to find what we need. We didn`t really do anything except listen to the guide of the Holy Ghost, and we were led right there. Now the missionaries in La Democracia have someone to teach :).
On another occasion, my companion and I were walking down a lonely road that we had heard was a shortcut to another part of the area. We had never been, but wanted to see if it was true. Suddenly, I just felt like I needed to stop. So I did, even though I didn`t know why. I may have kept going, but before I could it started to rain. We took out our umbrellas and went back the way we had come from, hoping to not get lost in the rain. We thought that we had felt like we needed to stop because of the rain, so we were glad. But the next day we asked someone about that road, and we learned that that road is one of the most dangerous places in the entire area. Especially in this part of year that the sugar cane is tall, we would very likely have been assaulted. We asked a couple other people, and they all told us the same thing: we should NEVER, EVER go down that road. I`m almost positive that, while we didn`t know anything that day, we felt the need to stop because there was an unknown danger awaiting us that day, and God needed us to be safe. And just in case we didn`t follow the Spirit, he sent the rain as another way to make us go back. That day, I learned another role of the Spirit: a security guard to keep us safe.
That`s all for now. I`ll talk next week about my adventures in the capital and listening to Elder Walker, a seventy of the church.
Love you guys!
-Elder Cloward
 |
| Me when I wake up in the morning |
 |
| The nicest part of Siquinalá. |
 |
| The capital. |
No comments:
Post a Comment