Beautiful Guatemala

Beautiful Guatemala
Me with a random field worker. I love the knife!

Monday, September 3, 2012

Ward Attendance is Up!


HEY EVERYONE!!

Hope y’all are doing great! Here are a few things that we’ve been up to.

1. Divisions! On Wednesday we did divisions! Usually, hermanas never do divisions, or switch comps for a day, but I think president wants to try out new stuff. I went to San Felipe with Hermana Estrada for the day, and Hermana Crooks came to Las Palmas to work with my comp. It was fun in San Felipe because the 2 sets of hermanas live together. It was a party. San Felipe is really nice because it’s not hot there, it’s nice and cool! It’s great there! I would love to go there but try not to think about it and get my hopes up.

2. The attendance is going up!!! We’ve been working hard to get people to come to church and the attendance was 96 on Sunday!! That’s way up from 60 a few weeks ago. Our ward is struggling. Here’s a run-down of our ward - and I say all of this smiling-: Our bishopric consists of our bishop (who works out of town every day and can’t really help us out or do anything), one counselor and an 18 yr. old kid who is the secretary or something. We currently don’t have an elders quorum president. Our young men’s president has been drinking lately. And there aren’t counselors for either of these organizations. We are really lacking in worthy priesthood holders in this ward, so I don’t even know who is going to fill these callings. And of course there is no ward mission leader. The relief society presidency is alright, but the ladies bicker and gossip so much! Agh! Sometimes we just don’t know what to do here! Everyone is always getting offended by everyone.  Sometimes I feel like we are in charge of a ward of junior high kids with all the little fights that happen. It’s been a great learning experience here in Las Palmas, and we’ve had to work hard and look and pray for solutions. I don’t know if I’m going to have changes next week or what, but I can keep going here. It’s rough but we can keep going.

In church we had 2 investigators - Diego (a 12 yr. old) and Josue (the blind guy), and we are really thinking that they’re both going to get baptized, so we are excited about that. 

3. Just a quick story. We are teaching this Evangelica lady named Yolanda, she’s really cool and even though she loves the church she goes to, when we taught her about the restoration a few weeks ago, she could see that we had reason in what we said, and she felt the spirit. This week we went and her super Evangelica sister was there, so we decided to reteach about the restoration. The sister, Maria, was nice, but said she said she didn’t agree with anything, doesn’t think that we need prophets anymore, thinks she should just ask her pastor if what we say is true, etc. It was cool because just using some scriptures in the Bible we were able to show her that her bible says that what we say is correct. Ha! It was funny to me because she wouldn’t admit to us that she could see that we had good points, but we could see that she had some doubts.   Her sister Yolanda now has even bigger doubts I just love the gospel because it just makes sense. It’s nothing crazy or different than what Jesus always taught. My testimony is always strengthened when we teach a lesson like that because, wow, even with just the Bible, this stuff has got to be true. I know that just like in bible times, today we need a living prophet. I know that the Gospel had to be restored, because it was changed by men after Christ and his apostles were killed. I just know that this is true! Being a missionary is fun and you just learn so much! It’s great!

Things really are going alright here. I hope y’all have a great week!!!

Love, Hermana Gilland

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