Monday, April 22, 2013

Andando (come on!)

Hello!
Life is going alright here in the mission right now. We are kind of plateau-ing with the zone. Not seeing too much improvement in a lot of aspects. We had a couple cool miracles pass us last week with some investigators though so it is looking pretty good. My comp is getting closer to ending his mission(2 weeks...).

With our investigators this whole last week, we barely saw any progress and advancement and we were getting down on ourselves. During planning on Thursday, we decided to do a fast on Saturday especially for this one family we are teaching so that they can get baptized. We did the fast and that afternoon on Saturday in the lesson we had with this family, they basically just had a huge change of heart and said that they were now all wanting to get baptized. I have no clue what happened in their hearts for them to change that fast, but I know that I am going to be fasting more often. We put baptismal dates with all of them(Mirta, Vanesa, Ayelèn, and Luciano) for this next Saturday because they needed to go to church one more time. The unfortunate thing is that they didn`t make it to church yesterday! Ugh! There are way too many trials in the mission. Ha ha. Maybe it wasn`t God`s will for them to get baptized this next week. Who knows, maybe my comp will be able to baptize his last week here in Argentina!

Elder Barton is rounding the corner and starting to realize more that he is going home as he gets his classes ready, receives his flight plans, writing his stewardship paper for the end of his mission, etc. We are still working hard though. That is a good thing!

The bishop called us on Saturday night and told us that we are assigned talks for sacrament meeting. In our ward they do a missionary work sunday each month on the third sunday. We both had to talk for like 20 minutes. Good thing I had a couple talks prepared, so I just went off of those. I think that one of the big blessings of being set apart as a missionary is that it is not too hard to put together a quick talk and give it. ha ha.

Leonardo, our convert, is progressing a ton! He finished the Book of Mormon now and is starting to read all the other books that we gave him. He loved the preparing to enter the holy temple booklet and had tons of questions. That was fun. Ha ha. I can`t wait to go back to the temple when I finish the mish. Leo is doing all he can so that his daughter, Milagros, can get baptized also, but she loves to sleep on Sunday mornings...

We are also starting to work more with our less active member families because we are finding lots of part-member families. Maybe we will be baptizing and completing more familes in the near future. It is just really hard to work with inactive members.

We did an activity this week with puppets. It was something the ward mission leader put together. We basically did a puppet show on "the life of a missionary", but not really. Ha. I don`t think we got much of what the missionary work in the ward needed, but oh well. At least we had fun with puppets...I´ll attach a pic.

The San Rafael zone is not really going anywhere. I am just kinda doing all that I can right now as a leader as well as waiting patiently for transfers to see some new missionaries in the zone...ha ha.

Today, we have plans to go visit a bodega(winery) because it is basically my comps last p-day(because we may be going to Mendoza next monday) and he hasn`t been to a bodega yet. There are plenty here in San Rafael so that should be fun.

Sorry I didn`t give too many details on the piche(armadillo) last week. The answer is yes, it was pretty good. It was one of the fattiest things that have ever eaten. It is not clean. It makes you feel like just taking a long shower and eating about 4 pounds of laxatives and tums to get that thing out of you as fast as you can. Armadillo burps are worse than fish burps. Ha ha. 
Thanks for all the prayers. Love you!
Un abrazo,
Elder Larisch
La iglesia es verdadera