Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Día Mundial de Servicio (World day of Service)

Hey there! How is everyone doing?

We had another super busy week here like always. Some of the main events were zone conference, world service day, and a baptism in Líbano B.

Dang! Are you serious, the Giants took it this year? What did Detroit have that let them get so far? River Platte and Boca(the two big teams from Buenos Aries) played yesterday and had a draw. We accidentally got a glimpse in a few houses as we were proselyting. Ha.

It has kinda been a tough week. We got disappointed many times for people not keeping their commitments or not even being home to teach them. It has taken some patience for the both of us, but we know that it is just another one of those "trials of faith" that Heavenly Father is putting in our path so that we can become stronger. I just know that if the mission was easy and if we were baptizing every week, we wouldn´t even be able to learn anything or pass any real hard times. So...I, in a way am grateful for the opposition that we are battling against because it makes us turn to the Lord more and seek His help.

We are still working with Elizabet and Omar even though we have been visiting sparingly this past week. Elizabet has a testimony of the Book of Mormon because she has read the entire thing and prayed about it. The enemy now is just doing what he normally does and attacks in the precise moment so she has a hard time following through with her baptism. Omar still needs a testimony. They should get baptized on the 10th for sure! Just need lots of faith-filled prayers and real conversations with my Heavenly Father to get a little more help with this situation.

Juliana Acosta(9) came to church. That is great, but we need the family to come. Right now in the mission, we are just focusing a ton on finding families to teach and baptize. Families are really the most important unit in society. Eternal life is a principle built around the family. We have a few great families that we are working with, but it is super difficult getting them to come to church for their own separate reasons. "Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you." We will be truly asking in every prayer that we do for families that are ready to hear the gospel. Miracles happen!

Yep, we had zone conference again. It feels like we have it all the time. I still don´t know how president and the assistants do it. So we were all together at the stake center for all of Friday for that. President focused a lot on ch. 10 in Preach My Gospel and the assistants taught us about how we should be working with our area books and our agendas. Zone conferences are always great opportunities to learn.

Supposedly it was World Service Day on Saturday. I am not sure if it was a church thing or some sort of holiday, but we spent all morning doing service. It was pretty sweet! We split up as a stake and cleaned up like 3 plazas really well! I had part in planting trees, cleaning up leaves, painting light poles, having fun on the teeter-totter, and digging some holes. It was a really fun and charitiful activity. I will try to get some pics to ya.

I did my first baptismal interview this past week for Cecilia Dominguez(Líbano B, the other elders in the other half of our ward), who now is one of the newest members of La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días. She was super prepared and just ready to get baptized. Her mom wants also wants to get baptized, but is not yet prepared so it may be a week or two. We weren´t able to go to the baptism because we were still doing service, but I heard it was a great baptismal service.

Well, Halloween is this week...We don´t have too many plans. We are just going to try to go to as many houses as we can on Wednesday and share a cool message(I still am not quite sure how we can share a Gospel Message when we are trying to focus it on Halloween...) and give out tons of caramelos(candies) to the kids. Halloween isn´t really a holiday here, but you can find a couple people here and there that will probably want to celebrate a bit. Should be fun. I don´t know what I am going to be yet, I will probably just take Mallory´s advice and be a missionary. I am only going to have to ask mom to send me that one tie that I wore to my first homecoming dance(white and orange) on super-express shipping for Halloween. Ha.

Un abrazo cariñoso,
Elder Deven Larisch
La Iglesia es verdadera and I´ll be looking forward to seeing mom and dad´s halloween costumes...
 Day of service...