Tuesday, January 1, 2013

¡Me Quedo!

Good Afternoon USA!!
Yep, today is the day we received transfers. Pretty exciting. Lots of changes going on here in Chimbas Zone. My district was all able to baptize this past week. We ended this transfer with a bang! It was awesome being able to talk with the family. Christmas was fun/boring and New Years will be much better!

Well I can imagine just how anxious you are to hear about transfers...ha. E´ Egbert is outta here! He is going to make his way over to a place called Valle de Uco back in Mendoza. I am going to stay here for the hottest summer of my lifetime with a latin comp. His name is E´ Correa. All I know is that he came in the same group as E´ Egbert and E´ Johnson, he is supposed to be really cool, and he is from Buenos Aires, AR. My district is changing a lot. But we will have an equally successful following transfer. E´ Johnson is going to San Luis(he is my son, I need to know where he is going) and he is getting his first latin comp! E´ Wixom is coming in close. He is going to be the new zone leader in the San Juan Zone, so we will be working closely with the Kim Family.

Christmas was kinda fun. We got passed by the huge zonda on Christmas Eve and that just ruined everything. Knocked out the power of everywhere in San Juan. So even more than everyone burning of hot(115 degrees F) winds, everyone was stuck inside their house without functioning air conditioning and ways to make their food. We just got a couple candles out and played cards all night till 10 with a couple other elders, then went over and had an asado with our ward mission leader. Christmas was awesome because I got to see and talk to all the family, but other than that it was super boring because we couldn´t go out and proselyte. It will be the same way tomorrow for the 1st, but we have the keys to the Institute and lots of elders are coming. We are also going tonight to the Familia Kim´s house to pass the new year. They, I have to say are very much one of the top families in my whole mission. They treat me like their real son. We have been spending a lot of time with them lately because their 18 year old son, Sebastián(who hid from us for a long time) felt left out and now has a testimony and wants to get baptized. We took some photos yesterday. Bad news is that the computer is not letting me send pis today so it will have to wait till next week. Sorry.

The whole Kim family showed up to church...on time! It is a super awesome thing that they all showed up, but the thing is, with our ward, they all show up late. But the Kim family still had a really good experience with our ward and they will be coming back. Sebastián(18) has a baptismal date for the 12th at 7:00. His parents, who we are ready to marry, have the date for the 19. We are praying, as well as many ward members, that they can make it to that date. We have a bunch of other investigators that we are preparing for this month. I hope E´ Correa likes to work hard and baptize because we are going to be doing just that. I just wish marrying a couple could be easier because we are working with a plethora of good unmarried couples.

We had a pretty awesome miracle reference this past week. We went contacting with a member when she took us to this house that we dropped off a baptismal invitation the other day. The señora let us in and we saw that the invitation was still on the table. Her name is Claudia Marchado and she is an inactive Evangelist, but still firmly believes in God. We started talking and she said that she really wanted to go and see it but something else came up. We found out that she is the aunt of an active member in the ward, but had never talked with the missionaries before. We kept going in the lesson and found out that she has been the most prepared investigator that I have ever come across in the history of my mission. She said that she was praying for someone to help her son-in-law with his life, she has had lots of signs that this is the true church, and she has even seen The Other Side of Heaven one time when she was looking for good, christian movies. It was just an amazing lesson seeing how much of the Lord´s hand had been in her life even before we got there. I hope that she will be able to progress peacefully to be able to come and get to know the church.

Spiritual Thought
After Skype on Tuesday I have been thinking about my family and what they really mean to me and the love I feel towards them. I came across a video today on lds.org that impacted me. https://www.lds.org/youth/video/still-a-family?lang=spa It is really hard to think of how I would feel if I was that young man who out of nowhere lost members of his family. His attitude is just the thing that really hit me. What does the knowledge of God´s Great Plan of Happiness mean to us? Does it affect the way we live? The decisions we make? When families are sealed, that family becomes eternal. Nothing, but the members of the family themselves can break that bond made in the temple. Seguimos siendo una familia.

I love you all very much and pray for you every day. Enjoy your winter!
Un abrazo,
Elder Dev Larisch
La iglesia es verdadera