My beloved Pazmiño family has a son, Diego, serving
in California right now. Every once in a while he´ll email me and tell
me a name to go find and teach of one of his friends. He gave us one
name, Kevin. I went to his little brother Jerry to have him come with us
to show us where he lives, but Jerry´s a little punk and told us that
Kevin is never in his house and that it´s basically impossible to meet
him (that excuse sounds weird in English but that´s actually a pretty
common challenge. People work all day and get home at eight or eight
thirty, and we have to be at home at eight thirty.)
Anywho we went along
on our way, but seriously, we had no investigators, and the members
weren´t giving references, so we have had to resort to contacting. So we contacted an older guy that was getting his car
fixed at the house of our lider misional, and we set up an appointment
to teach him and his wife. A few days later, we went to meet with the
guy and teach him, but here´s the problem. The streets have names, but
they don´t have signs. Lots of people don´t know what streets they live
on, and 98% of the houses here don´t have house numbers. So ... it´s
difficult to find houses. We stopped in front of what maybe could have
been his house and called out (we don´t knock) and 7 or 8 teenaged to 25
year old boys came out. Most of them were very interested in talking to
us but not for any good gospel-related reason. But
we didn´t have anything else to do, so we sat down and taught them the
first half of the Restoration. A very dedicated Evangelical came out and
started trying to pick fights over doctrine with us though, so we
didn´t teach all of the restoration, which was fine because most of the
people weren´t paying attention anyway, only one person was actually
asking questions about prophets and the apostasy instead of if my hair
color was natural and if I wore colored contact lenses.
So we ended the
lesson, and we went up to the one focused person and asked him if we
could teach him again sometime. He said that he would like that, and we
set an appointment, We asked for his name and apellido, and when we
wrote it down, I was thinking, "Huh, that sounds familiar". Thirty
seconds later, I flip to the front of my agenda where I had written down
the names that Diego wanted us to find, and sure enough, right at the
top was the name we just wrote down. I asked him if he knew Diego
Pazmiño and sure enough, we found the impossible to meet Kevin Perez.
We´ve taught him and his mother a few times, and Kevin is really
interested and is reading all the things we gave him to read and feeling
good about his decision to be baptized. They both came to church
yesterday, and we had a nice normal testimony meeting (hallelujah!). His
mother still has a lot of doubts and questions, but Kevin is
progressing awesomely and if all goes well, he will be getting baptized
on the fifteenth of February. Today Diego emailed me again and asked me
if we ever found Kevin, because he really felt that he would be
interested in the gospel, and it was fun emailing him and telling him
about everything that has happened.
Also, Edisson, who was baptized on the 18th, is pretty much the greatest
person ever. He has had so much opposition from his family members and
friends about the church (his grandpa is very, very, VERY Jehovah´s
witness and lots of his friends have stopped hanging out with him
because he´s a Mormon now, and the ones that do hang out with him make
fun of him). But he is doing amazingly. He really likes movies, so we
lent him one of the Doctrine and Covenants discs with the Restoration
video on it. Each disc has a ton of movies on it though, but we told him
to watch the Restoration. He watched all of them, and two days ago told
us all the things he learned about Oliver Cowdery and the lost pages of
the Book of Mormon and the earliest missionaries in the restored
church.
Yesterday, he received the Aaronic priesthood and he was just
glowing! Yesterday in the afternoon, we stopped by to teach him a little
bit (after baptism you reteach all the lessons and teach about the laws
and ordinances of the gospel like temple work). Anyway we call into the
house, and we hear a whistle (used to get attention) and we look up and
he´s on the roof with his scriptures and his ¨Principios del Evangelio
book reading about the nature of the Godhead. Riiiight? He also was
excited to hear that there are mission prep classes, because he is so
much happier since finding the church and he wants others to be happy as
well. Then he told us about how one of his friends that he hadn´t seen
in a while asked him "why are you so much happier now?" and Edisson
said "So I taught him the Plan of Salvation".
It was so cool! He told us that he didn´t know what to say, so he just
started talking, and he told us that he was pretty sure he wasn´t using
his own words, but the words of the Holy Ghost. Right after saying that,
he was just like, I don´t know if that´s how the Holy Ghost works or if
that´s right, that´s just what I thought. We were just smiling so big
and told him he was absolutely correct. Me and Hermana Chil decided
afterwards that anytime we were feeling discouraged, we were just going
to go to Edisson´s house and have him teach us what he learned. We
taught him too about temples and ahh it was just swell. He is just the
perfect example of someone who not only needed the gospel, but was
prepared by the Lord to receive the gospel. I´m pretty sure we didn´t
even teach him in some innovative or particularly great way, it´s just
that he did his part to receive his own conversion.
I don´t really have anything else to say haha. Oh yeah, I had an
intercambio with the Hermana leader, Hermana Pereez, who is basically
the greatest person ever. She just exemplifies all the Christlike
attributes in Predicad mi Evangelio, and I learned lots of things that I
need to improve haha.
Last Monday, me and Hermana Chil bought a funky looking fruit, just cuz we were curious.
