Monday, March 17, 2014

La vigésimo sexta semana!

Buenas Tardes,

This week was crazy. We went out and worked with everything we have for most of the week. We did have our short comings, but that is how you learn.

We have now attempted to contact every inactive member in our area, which is a great opportunity to find new investigators. Usually the addresses that we have are awful because they don't really have directions here. You have to find the neighborhood they live in and then just start asking for them until you find someone who knows where they live. This is a great opportunity to share the gospel with everyone you talk with. The second great thing is that normally there are non members in the houses of inactive and that normally gives you someone new to teach also. And then the very best part is that most of these people who are inactive are just waiting for someone to visit and remind them that Christ loves them. We love to then share Omni 1:26 and Alma 5:32-34, which are invitations to come unto Christ.

The most notable events of this week were when we did interchanges with the zone leaders and Elder Gillespie came to my area and worked with me. It went incredible. We only had one lesson fall through, everyone was super receptive, we worked with the members and received references and contacted a lot of people. We even found a new family, although the dad did leave and we weren't able to teach him. Pretty much we killed it. You could see the Lord guiding everything we did, from the people we talked to and the words we spoke.

We also had stake conference this week, which was way cool, but also a pain because it made it a lot harder to invite people to church and because we lost pretty much all of Saturday, why, because we had to go an hour and a half away on a bus to get to the stake center. Then our ward left us, so we had to go with another ward and they took us to eat papusas. We got a ride home with another brother from the ward, but we didn´t end up making it home until late, which is really bad, unfortunately there just wasn´t much we could do because we didn´t have a way to get home by curfew. Luckily, the zone leaders knew what was happening, so we didn´t get in trouble.

The Sunday session was a broadcast from Salt Lake City to all of Central America. Elder Scott can speak Spanish. Elder Oaks spoke too, but he had a translator so did Bonnie Oscarson and Elder James Martino. It was very spiritually enlightening and I was happy to hear from these great apostles of Christ!

Elder Vierkant


Gringos will be gringos!

 
Ready for the beach transfer :)

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

La vigésimo quinta semana!

Qúe tal mis amigos,

This week were changes, but neither I nor mi companion had changes. We were the only two in the whole zone besides Zone leaders to not have changes and the zone leaders have to go to changes to pick up the new people.

This week was pretty cool because after changes, we got a new district leader and he is super ready to work hard and he has a lot of love to give. That combined with a great district and zone meeting made fire in the zone. Everyone worked really hard this week. My companion and I contacted lots people in the street in a normal day while we were looking for all the inactive members in an area. WE have had a lot of success with bringing people back to church if we haven't had much success bringing new people to church. We had 10 less active and inactive people in the church this week and it was elections so there were only 40 people there. I guess you can´t really measure success just by how many baptisms or new people you bring to Christ but it is also really important that we fight to the finish and we are helping these people do just that.

We had an activity as a zone combined with the wards in our area. There were free eye exams and we stood outside inviting people in to have eye exams and also getting their information so we could visit them. We did contacted about 30 people and I got super brown/red. But it was fun and great break. I hope there are some good results from that activity. What am I saying, I know it will. Good works always bring forth good fruit. Read it in the scriptures.

Hasta la proxima semana,

Elder Vierkant

My companion and I said goodbye to a couple of great Brethren from our ward who were leaving to serve missions, one in Guatemala and the other in Mexico.
 



 
 

 
 

Monday, March 3, 2014

La vigésimo cuarta semana!

Hola!

I am not going to lie, this week was pretty hard! We have been working really hard to teach with members, to teach well together, ask inspired questions, use the scriptures and testify. It has been working really well in terms of the quality of our lessons. We feel the spirit very strongly and we can see them feeling the spirit testifying of what we have said. It feels great at that point. Then we extend invitations for them to put in practice what we have taught and come to church and they give us a lukewarm answers like, "primero Dios" or something else that doesn't really mean anything. Or they say yes, but don´t do anything about it. More specifically, we invite them to church and they don´t come or when we go to bring them to church, they hide from us. This Sunday we finally got people to come to church, 3 kids, and they said they were going to go to the bathroom and then took off running for home. After that experience, my companion and I were pretty bummed out. But then we talked with our bishop and he said something I really liked. 'Sometimes when we are working the hardest we have the least results. But eventually we will see the blessings in our lives. We just have to keep going and working until the Lord sees fit that we receive blessings.' Understanding that, I am excited to keep working!

Elder Vierkant