Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Hello!

Dang, this computer is freezing up on me a ton! I don´t know how much I am going to be able to get over to you today. We have some pretty sweet pictures this week...and still many from last week that I wanted to get off. Well, it will just have to wait till when I get home and we can check them all out on the computer. Ha.

It wasn´t too bad of a week. Even though we got some the best numbers that we have this transfer, I still don´t feel like we did that much. Sadly, this is one of those weeks where there is not a ton of highlights. But hey, I´ll try and conjure up what I can think of. I received the Christmas package already! The zone leaders must have passed by the offices in perfect timing to pick it up. Well, it is here a little early... and due to a lot of peer pressure(I do not recommend opening packages around wild missionaries) a couple gifts may have accidentally been ripped open...Thank you for the pajama pants(I promise I won´t wear them until Christmas Eve to keep the tradition going), for the Andes, for the Sour Patch, and also for the CD´s from Gma and Gpa. That was all that I was tempted to open. I will try(the hardest that I can) and save the rest for Christmas(except the present for my comp, because I will probably only be with E´ Johnson for like one more week, and I think he deserves a little gift or something for all this time putting up with me. Ha). We got a baptism in Rawson(my other boys in my district) this past weekend! E´ Johnson and I attended and helped them out a bit. It was an awesome service! The rest of the family of this lady is going to be following close behind. Same with a couple of our investigators...Elizabet has been super sick these past few weeks so we have not been able to have as much contact with her as we are needing for her to get baptized and Yuliana´s family did not come to church with her yesterday so that is going to be complicated. We are going to be working our butts off again this week, especially because it is the last week of the transfer, to get these people baptized.

Well, this may or may not be my last week working in San Juan. I´ve already got 4.5 months working here so Pres is most likely going to send me off to some other far off land. Next week I´ll probably give you my thoughts and feelings of San Juan and the news of transfers. Along with a Eulogy type thing for E´ Johnson because he has been such an awesome, grade A compaƱero.

I am pretty bummed that I can´t send any of these pictures to you this week. Oh well, just wait for the next week.

I guess we had some cool experiences this week. We met some very prepared people to receive us just by doing our "open the mouth´s" in the streets. I "opened the mouth" with this guy yesterday in front of his house. We were in a trio because we had one of the youth of the ward with us. He was a very intellectual man that wanted to teach us something about the philosophy that he knew and some of the cool scientific studies that have been done to prove that God exists. It was very interesting stuff, but I knew something that this man was not familiar with yet. The restored knowledge of Gods great plan of happiness that we gain from the Book of Mormon. This man was also fascinated by the map of God´s plan that we have in our brochure things we hand out. We gifted him a book and he willingly invited himself to church and we put a baptismal date with him and a return date for today, Monday. Not very often to you meet someone in the street that prepared to receive the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. It really touched me the story of Cade´s conversion story that Grandma sent me today. Reading that story, I automatically placed myself in the situation of being one of those missionaries that arrived at his door that day, there ready to teach him. I here so many conversion stories(almost every day), but when it is the conversion of my own family it has a higher meaning and feeling to it. Cade is going to be an awesome missionary.

I love hearing all of this missionary news coming from the home ward. I can´t believe that we have 17 missionaries out right now! Incredible! I heard a cool fact that after Pres. Monson made the missionary age reduction announcement, the missionary applications sent in weekly went from 700 to 4000! The dream of Nebuchadnezzar(Daniel 2) is being fulfilled. The stone cut without hands is filling the whole earth!

That is AWESOME news that Kim is cancer free! I have been praying faithfully for that. Now we just have to keep the continual prayer to make sure that the baby girl is healthy.

I don´t yet have plans for Thanksgiving. Surprisingly it is not even a holiday here in Argentina. We will make sure that we celebrate well. I will probably be in a new area, so we may have to invite ourselves over to a members´ house or something and have some chicken(because turkey is very hard to find here), unless grandpa doesn´t mind sending me some of that dark turkey that he makes every year in a little package or something along with some mashed spuds.

That´s all for this week. Thank you for all the heartfelt prayers in my behalf and in the behalf of all other full-time missionaries. Here is another cyber-hug from...
Un Abrazo,
Elder Larisch
La iglesia es verdadera