La trigésimo primera semana!

Hola, ¿Que tal mis amigos?

Another week has passed in El Salvador and I am more and more convinced that the world is crazy. No, but that this last week was awesome. After writing last week, we went to some ancient ruins. They were super sweet, I will send pictures next week when I am using a computer in the stake center because the computer I am using in a cyber cafe is a bit weird.

Wednesday were changes and both my companion and I left Opico. I got an awesome new companion, Elder Gavilanes, from Ecuador. Pretty much we are awesome together and we go and kick butt. I got moved to an area called La Ponderosa 2 in Sonzacate. That name reminds me of a old western show, I don't remember the name of it, just that there was a ranch called the Ponderosa and there was a huge guy named Hoss. I love this area! The people are super nice and we have a good time. The area has a lot of positive investigators. There is the Rivera family who has some family members that were baptized and the rest are working on it. They are super cool and we always have a good time at their house. We also are teaching Veronica. Yesterday she said she wants to be baptized and we are going to work with her, hopefully sometime in May to get baptized.

This Sunday was kind of a bummer though because everyone here goes to the beach for Easter Sunday, which really doesn't make any sense to me. What day is it? Easter! What does Easter honor? Christ! What should we do? We should go to... THE BEACH! Honestly people, go to church. Any ways, I got to go, we have a P-day activity. We are going to the beach.

Mucho amor,

Elder Vierkant

La semana trigésimo!

Hola todos!

I am writing a little bit late this week because we are going to see some ruins that are not opened Mondays. A really great thing about this zone is that we always do something really cool for Preparation day.

This past week was interesting. We weren't able to talk with Edwin at all this week and he didn't come to church or any of the activities that we have. We did a lot of cool things that he just didn't come to. We play soccer in Saturday morning at the church, we teach English, there was a baptism and a wedding for the other missionaries and we had a super sweet family home evening. We just weren't able to get him to go.

Some good news was that we had another investigator and his life companion in church this week. They have been investigators for basically 10 years and their kids are baptised, but they haven't been to church our entire time here. We went to their house after church, on interchanges with the district leader, Elder Stone. We talked about what is holding them back. Basically, from what we understand, he just doesn't understand that we have to show our faith to God through action and that he wont just do everything for us with out that action. As such, he doesn't want to get baptised and married yet. On the other hand, we finally got his companion to talk and she understands. She obviously understands the gospel and action. She is just patiently waiting for him to realize that he has to take this step towards Christ and get married and baptised and prepare himself to get sealed in the temple.

We are learning and growing as a companionship and our struggles really are making us better people. It makes me think of a shirt I have from wrestling. It says"The Grind" and has a skinny little boy falling into a grinding and coming out a huge man. That is really what is happening!

Con el amor!

Elder Vierkant


Photos: We went to a volcano with some jungle terrain. I also ate a huge pupusa loca with goodness knows what was in it but it was the best papusa that I have ever eaten. We also had a super sweet family home evening with a part member family, less actives and the ward mission leader.

La vigésimo novena semana!

Hola mis amigos!

This week flew by, like always.

The highlight of this week was general conference. I got to say it was like recharging a dead battery listening to conference. I learned so much from every single talk. But the most important thing that I feel I learned from conference wasn´t from what they said, but how I felt. The love that these men have for the gospel and for their fellow brethren was very evident to me this conference. You can also very visibly see their happiness and positivity and the only thing that you can attribute that to is the gospel. And it isn´t just something that I see and feel as someone who has lived the gospel for many years. One investigator after conference said that when he went home there was a love and happiness that he had felt and he couldn´t forget.
 
As for our progress this week, we have had success with Edwin, one man we met just standing in a dirt road. He has gone to church twice and he is really interested to learn. Alex is having difficulties committing to doing things, which is severely hindering his progress. Felicito, well he is just really hard to get in touch with because he works so late and we can only see him on the weekends, but my companion and I have a lot of faith in him.
 
Those are the main matters that stick out in my mind this week.

Hasta la semana quentra mis amigos!

Elder Vierkant

An amazing birthday cake for another Elder!

Semanas veintisiete y veintiocho!

Hola!

Last Monday we went to the beach for Pday with half the zones here in our mission in El Salvador. It was really awesome, but we spent way too much time there, so I didn´t have much time to write. We finally had two investigators in church that are positive.

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I really cannot believe that it is already Monday again. The time just flies so fast that makes me worry that my mission will be over before I know it. It really is a learning experience. I hope that I can be humble enough to learn all the lessons that life is willing to teach me.
This week we cut a lot of our investigators who aren´t very positive and weren´t progressing. At first I was a bit worried about doing it. But It has helped because it made more time for those who are willing to listen to us and are willing to do the things that are necessary to learn about the gospel. It is sad to leave these people who need the gospel in their lives, but maybe they can receive it in the future.
 
We have had 3 different people in the church this week. One is the father of a member who was listening to members before. His name is Felicito. He is really positive now that one of his sons is on a mission. The only problem is that it is hard to teach him because he is only home after 9 at night Saturdays and Sundays.
 
We also had Alex and Edwin in church. Edwin stayed the whole 3 hours, our first investigator to do so. Alex lives in a huge family that is some how magically bigger every time we show up to his house, which makes it hard because we have to help so many people focus, but it is awesome to have a family like that to teach and it is always fun to be there. In our area, we have another two pueblos that are pretty far away, but are important to the growth of the ward, so we have been taking time to go out to one that is named Tacachico and another one named San Matias. There the people haven´t heard a lot about the gospel and we have met a lot of people who are interested. But the most positive people always come from references from members. Members really are key to having success in missionary work.
 
I hope you are all doing well and are all helping the missionaries in your area.

Hasta luego!
 
Elder Vierkant

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 :)

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.
 

 

 

 

 

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