Week #26

April 15, 2015

6 months today!!!!

Well this past week has been awesome! Our hard work and faith is really starting to pay off! We really shot up in lessons this week and we got a couple new investigators too. One of these new investigators is a lady that's about 35 years old and she is blind! The cool thing is though that her husband is a member and he is blind too! A blind couple. So that's pretty cool to be teaching them! Also, I don't know if I have said this yet, but we got a branch mission leader and he is awesome! He is helping us find all these less actives that we didn't even know existed. Just going by the number he has showed us we should have 250 people attending church every Sunday but we only have about 100. So yeah we have some work to do.. Also this past week we had the opportunity to do some service to the old lady in Canmogsay that always feeds us! We got to clean out some weeds and stuff from an area so they could plant some root crop plants there! It was hard work! We had to use these overly large hoe things and it was intense. It was there that I discovered that Filipinos like to talk more than work. So it was just me and the old nanay working while the other missionaries talked! Oh well she gave me brownies later so jokes on them! This week we also had the opportunity to bless an old lady with a raging fever. Like I'm talking you could feel the heat coming off of her. So we blessed her and she was fine the next day! It's these kind of experiences that really build my faith in the priesthood! So I also have a challenge for everybody! I've seen this in my mission a lot and I'm starting to wonder if the majority of people have done it. People here tend to be converted to the gospel because it looks attractive to them or they are converted to the missionaries. So we always ask them a question that I would like to extend to you. Have you prayed and asked Heavenly Father if this is the only true church on the earth. If you haven't I challenge you to do so. It makes all the difference in how you live your life as I have found out since I have been out. We also had the opportunity to talk to a married couple yesterday who were married in the temple. They have conflicts. They don't wear their garments. And they don't attend church. So we talked to them about prayer. The beginning of the lesson started out just trying to resolve concerns between them.  So we asked them how they usually resolve concerns. They told us they pretty much just cool down by themselves. So back to prayer. We taught them that if they pray as a couple that God would help them. I think that's what it really comes down to. Is that if we don't pray, or in other words tell ourselves that we don't need Gods help, then life will get harder. So I think for anybody in this situation the solution would be to pray together. God will help, life will get easier, and people will have a happier marriage. Basta, on better notes I got a foot spa this morning and it felt great! My feet kind of hurt but oh well! That's it for this week! Thank you for your love and support and I love you all!

Elder Child

Notes:
We went back and forth about the fact that sister missionaries are a lot of times more effective than elders.  I told him because we are more spiritual ;-) and tend to let our emotions show a little more.  I asked him if he has ever gotten emotional during a discussion and he said, "Yeah, about 13 weeks ago, during a discussion about prayer and really discovering the church was true."  He said that you can tell if people really know by the way they act, and said that it is his favorite lesson to teach.

Picture #1 - language study in English, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Tagalog

Picture #2 - Apparently Spiderman looks a lot like Thor in the Philippines (look at the tag)