Monday, January 30, 2012

Email 1-30-12


Hello EVERYBODY,

How are you all doing? I’m doing awesome.  This week was a little tough for me and my companion but in the end it all turned out ok.  One of the families that we found the week before last week came to church.  It was sooooo legit.  In the end we had six people come to church.  We were soooo excited.  We worked really hard during the week and didn´t really have much success when it came to lessons and so we were feeling a little down, but in the end; it all ended good because we had 6 in church.  And we also had some super powerful lessons on Sunday too with some of the members.  It was crazy because I had to teach a class on Sunday with all the investigators and new members.  Principles of the Gospel, the lesson was Agency.  Adam, Eve ya all that good stuff that we try and stay away from because it gets complicated.  I had to teach it.  It actually ended up really good.  I focused more on how we really have 2 choices in the end.  Follow Satan, or Follow Jesus.  Every simple little decision that we make can come down to that ultimatum.  It’s rather interesting because I found myself talking about really what the prophets tell us; in that we can´t have one foot on both sides.  When we know what we should do we should just do it; instead of switching teams and dribble the ball out of bounds.  It was good because I don´t think that I confused the people tooo bad.  Just a little bit...  hahaha
My companion is progressing soooo fast with his Spanish its crazy.  All the members keep telling me.  It’s so cool to see where he came from and where he is going to be if he keeps his desire up.  Sometimes it gets hard for him in lessons because he gets lost in the conversation, but when he is sharing and talking his Spanish is almost flawless.  He has just a few little problems here and there, but nothing so extreme that the people can´t understand him. 
It’s been sweet because the goal for this year as missionaries is that we are going to find families to baptize.  Yes full families.  We want to teach the mom and the Dad.  At first I thought it was going to be hard to find a mom and a dad that would both listen to us.  But as we have changed our teaching methods and find methods to be more focused on the family, we have been able to see the fruits of our efforts.  We are finding a lot of families.  Some aren´t ready to progress, but hey someday they will be.  We are here to plant the seed.  But, we are here to plant, grow and harvest too. 
We had a lesson on Sunday with a guy named Braulio.  He wants to marry one of the sisters in our ward.  She told him that if she was going to marry him he had to get baptized, come to church every week, and they had to get married by a judge.  Well that is a lot of stuff to do for a Paraguayan but he said yes.  I guess he must really want to marry her.  We started teaching him.  He has ALOT of stuff that he needs to change in his life.  Drinking, smoking, beating his kids, and he says he is way active in his church.???  But hey anything is possible through Christ, that isn´t an excuse though, that we can just lay back and take it easy.  We talked about the restoration at first trying to get him to get a baptism date.  He kept saying that he had already been baptized with the baptism of ACTS 23 something like that.  We invited him and he said that he had already been baptized with that baptism.  I was just like ¨look dude,  Do you want a baptism like Jesus or a different baptism?¨ After that we just sat there in silence and the spirit was just working on him.  You could tell that at first he wanted to say that he was already baptized but the spirit was working him.  He said ¨yeah I want a baptism like Jesus¨ So we got him with fecha.  It’s hard because he works during the week until like 10 o’clock at night so we never have time to go and meet with him during the week, only on Sundays.  Well I guess we will just keep chuggin along with him. 

Quick Shout out to my man Theron Joe  ¨Air Native¨  Keep it going man. I got your letters.  Keep having fun and playing ball I will be back before you know it. 
 
This week looks like it will be a good productive week.  I think what I have learned from this last week is that really you can´t judge a missionary on how good his numbers look.  It’s really by how hard they are working to be the kind of missionary that the Lord wants them to be.  It’s the same with being a normal person.  Sometimes we judge people because they aren´t as spiritual as they should be.  We should not judge them because they may be trying.  We should be worrying about if we are being the person that God wants us to be.  I love you all and hope you have an awesome legit week.

Rohyhu mi familia
Elder Beatty

(No pictures this week because Presten is afraid that it might erase all his pictures)

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