Day 279

¡hola familia!
i now officially have 9 months on my mission. ¡que kpo! things are going well. we had a bunch of snow this week and it got pretty cold but now things are going well. we actually had a few snow ball fights with the kids in the street and it was awesome but i have to admit the snow made me think a lot about the snow at home. it´s strange getting snow at the end of july but it was great. the sun here is strong so it melted the snow pretty fast but then the cold wind froze it to make everything ice over. we ended up ´´ice skating´´ to each house. elder ruano didn´t want to try it but i was having lots of fun. but now there is a lot of mud because the streets are all dirt roads in my area.
being the new district leader has been really awesome too and i directed my first district meeting on friday. i felt like it went very well and we talked a lot about how to show the value of the book of mormon by applying it to their investigator in some way in every visit. if they can get a testimony of the book of mormon, everything else comes easily, and my comp and i have been focusing on that a lot lately.
this week was pretty successful and we have 14 fechas but nobody came to church... triste. we are working really hard but getting them in the chapel (y la pila) is the hardest part. we went on divisions with the zone leaders this week and i learned a few new things to apply in my area. they have one investigator that is mostly deaf so they are learning sign language with him and when i went to visit him i learned a whole bunch of really cool stuff. i was able to have a conversation and talk to him in sign language and i was really surprised how fast i was able to learn. it was really cool and now i can teach about the restoration in spanish sign language! ¡que kpo! we had a baptism on saturday for leila parra but we found out that she only has 8 years... fetch. oh well :). it went great and i was able to direct the baptism while presidente belvedere performed the ordenanza. i really enjoy being a part of baptisms and i hope i will have a lot more!!
losing elder taylor meant that we gained a few more investigators that those guys were teaching. they are doing awesome and we are preparing them to be baptized as well. we also found the familia antipan again and they are living in the same house that we helped the flia sepulveda move out of a few months ago. i think i wrote about the flia antipan disappearing one day... well now we found them again! they were having some marriage problems because alejandro drinks a lot, but we taught about the palabra de sabiduría and gave him a blessing of strength to overcome his addiction and now he´s doing a lot better. we also taught about prayer, and how we know if we are prepared for baptism. they are getting closer!
we also found a woman and her family that used to come to church about 5-10 years ago. her children were baptized in the church but she wasn´t. her daughters said that they stopped going because they found something in the book of mormon that said we worshiped devils and not God. i told them that was a load and that there is nothing in there that says it but she swears it was written in the last few white pages in the very back and that the ´´new copies´´ don´t have it anymore. sounds very strange to me. but we want to teach the mom how to read because she never learned and i think it would be easy to teach in spanish. all the words are pronounced exactly like it´s written so we will talk about the alfabeto and the sounds that each letter makes. she only knows a few vowels.
my puppies died a few days ago. two of them, godzilla and sandy. now we have 4 and i am planning on gifting another one because it starts crying in the morning and doesn´t stop. that´s my sad news for the week.
i was going to record something to send today but my comp didn´t want to talk on it with me so i didn´t do it. i just wanted to involve him but i guess he isn´t into that kind of thing... oh! we are also teaching the familia aroca and we started reading the book of mormon with them. they seemed pretty excited to start reading on their own and we assured them that we will come by any time to read with them or answer questions whenever they wanted. they just need to call :)
well, familia, i really love the mission. i was thinking the other day that my life has changed a lot so far and i can´t imagine going back to the ´´normal life´´. we are having a lot of fun while getting a lot done. this week, mosiah 8:18 stood out to me.
18 Thus God has provided a means that man, through faith, might work mighty miracles; therefore he becometh a great benefit to his fellow beings.
i was thinking a lot about how i can apply that scripture throughout the day, and i think a huge part of it is listening to the spirit to know when and how to act in every situation. for me, i wonder if a sudden thought or feeling really comes from the spirit or not, and that´s the hardest part for me, but i´m practicing... a lot. ¡hoy, escribí un montón! ¡ahí está!
bueno. i love you guys and i love hearing from you! it´s another ánimo pickup for me and i´m always grateful to get amor en papel :) i´m going to get better at writing hand written stuff too, les prometo.
¡con mucho amor y ánimo!
elder summers