The hardest time in my mission, so far.....

Hey everyone! I hope y'all are well!

 

This week has been interesting and good. Ill just tell a few interesting stories from the week.

 

1. So remember the baptism last week, with a 17 yr old kid named Josè Manuel? Well, we found out a little interesting twist to the story. On Wednesday we found out that between his baptism on last Saturday afternoon and his confirmation on Sunday morning, his girlfriend moved into his family´s shack in the boonies. Ha-ha yea, a slight problem right? That's not allowed. So to fix it we´re marrying them this coming Saturday and baptizing them. That sounds bad, but they really want to get married. I think its crazy but oh well. They tell us they're not sleeping together and we've taught them the law of chastity like3 times, so what else can we do? Sorry if that story was a little pg 13 for the kids, but its too good not to share.

 

2. Also this coming Saturday we have another baptism! Its a guy named Amílcar, hes 32 yrs old and has been investigating the church for like 20 years, and hes finally getting baptized! Yay!

 

3. We had Ward Council on Friday and the bishop is super stoked about missionary work! So were pumped about this. The bishops goal for each organization in the ward, that's 9 organizations, is to find and baptize one family each by the end of November. We are so excited and hoping so much that the ward actually gets on this because it would be incredible for the mission!

 

4. Random culture fact: here in Guatemala, we eat with our hands. Its pretty normal to be served a piece of meat with like a fork or spoon, no knife, so you have to just pick up the meat and go at it. its pretty disgusting, but that's life out here. The lady that cooks us lunch doesn't even own knifes to eat with.

 

5. So something sad happened on Sunday. It was definitely the hardest time in my mission so far. We have a tradition of visiting some recent convertsevery Sunday and having a quick lesson with them, and every week we hope that their 3 sons-in-law will come to listen to the lessons, because their wives are members but they're not. This Sunday they finally came! We were super excited and shared lesson one (about the restoration of the gospel), and it went really well. At the end we talked to them about praying to find an answer for themselves about whether or not it was true and things just got bad. We had thought it was going really well but all the sudden there was tons of contention about polygamy (my comp said that'sonly the 2nd time in her 17 months that polygamy has come up), and then one of the guys started picking apart how my comp had described when she prayed and received the answer that it was true, and how our Spanish was just going to confuse everyone, and all this other stuff that is too confusing to explain. Anyways, there was this terrible spirit in the room and I just burst into tears because I was so sad that they were so hard in their hearts and that they thought that they were supposed to be convinced by words to know if the church is true. So that was embarrassing. But they just kept going and going and it was terrible. It was terrible to feel the spirit leave like that. We cried a lot. I don't exactly know why, were girls you know. But it was awful. But it made me want to work even harder. There are so many stories about Paul and Peter and Ammon and Alma and all those guys about how powerfully they spoke and how people couldn't deny that they spoke with the power of God. I know that not everyone will accept the Gospel, but I want to someday be in tune enough with the spirit to leave people with no doubt that what were saying is the truth. I know that that's possible because so many in the scriptures do that. I hope that I can be worthy to represent the church like that. I'm going to work really hard to do that.

 

Well that was pretty much my week. I hope that last story wasn't depressing, they always tell us to write mostly happy stuff home. I know that the Gospel is true. It has to be. I know that Joseph Smith saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and that Thru Joseph they restored the true and perfect Gospel on the earth. I know that this is true. I hope that everyone has a great week! I pray for you all often! Thanks for your prayers on my behalf.

 

Hermana Gilland 

 

That was pretty much my week.