72 days to go....

¡hola familia! Jamie- ¡Happy Birthday! i hope you have an awesome day on Friday and i will be thinking of you all day! This week was another awesome one and i learned a lot. we had our zone conference on friday and it was great because president lovell came out with his new vision for the mission and announced the new standard. he wants us to focus more on the investigators that we have so that they progress instead of finding so many news in the week. we talked a lot about how we can help the people we teach progress and a lot of that comes from our planning. we talked about lucas 14:28-30, and our preparation. we do that with our studies in the morning and we talked about how we can plan and practice what we are going to teach. another new change in the mission is that every missionary is to study the language for one hour every morning before leaving the apartment. we now start our day at 11 instead of 10:30. we found paola again, and she didn`t read what we left her. we feel like her boyfriend (he is a member) is discouraging her because he doesn`t want to go to church again. he says that he isn`t ready to make changes in his life but he knew the gospel would help paola feel better about her family`s loss. it seemed like she kind of lost the spark but we are going to see what happens. gabriel is awesome because this week he went to buenos aires to check out the temple in the open house with his brother and the youth in our ward. he should be coming back today and his mom told us that he was feeling great. we are so excited to talk to him tomorrow and see how he is doing. azul is awesome too because she invited a friend to go with her to church with her little sister. the girls get along very well and they look forward to going to church every sunday. the thing is with her is that she is unsure about getting baptized. we are talking with her and her mom to try to help them get baptized together. that would be awesome. florencia is losing the spark too. there isn`t much more that we can do for her, she isn`t reading, praying, going to church, interacting with anyone outside of her house... it is sad for me but she doesn`t want to do anything. we are going to stop visiting her and give her a few weeks because she isn`t progressing anymore. the sellman family from oregon is doing great. the thing is that the mom doesn`t want us talking about God with their kids. we went to the kitchen with the dad, jose, and we talked with him for awhile about what is going on and he really opened up to us about a lot of things. he explained to us how a lot of terrible things have happened to him and his family and he is bitter with God, but he has a lot of questions about why we are here and about the true church (because he had a bad experience with the Catholic church). we asked him to give God another chance and he promised to read a part of the Book of Mormon that will help him. he thanked us for listening to him because he hasn`t been able to talk about those things for awhile and he felt better. we are hoping that he can feel the love that God has and that it can open a new door for him. in the zone, we have gone 3 weeks without a baptism. that`s really bad. it looks like this week we are going to 25 de mayo again for some more baptismal interviews and we are going to talk with gabriel and challenge him for this weekend as well. Thank you for the package! i got my package last monday. i am taking more pictures now. elder cortés wrote to me today. he told me that he can definitely feel the difference not being missionary any more and that it is not the same trying to teach people about the gospel. i imagine it would be like peter parker without the spiderman suit. that`s why i am grateful to be here and i`m taking advantage of my time while i am a missionary. i am thankful for all of your support while i am here. i love you guys! con mucho amor y ánimo, elder summers ps- jamie, otra vez, ¡feliz cumple!