so we had another interesting week
i think it started out on tuesday, we were walking along and
i look down and what did i see? popcorn popping on the apricot.. no i saw a
bill for 200 pesos on the ground (literally a bit less than 20 dollars, but i
would say that its worth more here, because everything is way cheaper) so at
first i was pretty excited, that’s a lot of gummies you can buy with 200 pesos,
but then a thought popped into my head, you know, what if it belongs to the
people who live here in front and they are prepared to listen to the gospel and i found this to be able to contact them?
so i knocked on the door and asked them if they had lost any money, turns out
they had, so i gave it to them and started to contact them...they basically
just slammed the door in my face. so here i am 200 pesos poorer. i feel like i
should feel good because i did the right thing or something else like that that
mom would say... but i guess I’m still not quite good enough to prefer that over
200 gummies.
Then wednesday was
interesting as well, we were studying and all the sudden all the lights went
out, we looked outside and the guy from the power company had just disconnected
our electricity. usually the lady in charge of our little gated community
brings us our mail, but this time she didn’t so we didn’t realize that we
already had the electricity bill, and we forgot to pay it. so thursday we did
and just lived with flashlights for a while, which was fine. what wasn’t fine was the water. here the water system uses
a pump to fill a tank on the roof, and then just uses gravity to distribute it.
so that worked for a little while until the tank ran out and we had no more
water, so luckily we still have access to elder M´ house and so we just
stayed there for a few days until they connected it on sunday.
the funny thing is the reason they took so long to connect
it. we called them after 2 days, and they told us that the guy had already
passed by but that our counter was inside of our house, so they couldn’t do anything.
it’s not inside of our house, but we live in a gated community, so apparently
the guy thought that the whole gated community was one house... oh well, at
least we have electricity again.
every first friday of the month we have started having a
family home evening with the ward, an activity where we can bring our
investigators to help them get to know the members. our ward mission leader
just got a job and was working, so we were left alone to plan it out, but it
actually turned out really well, we taught about prophets to prepare for
general conference, and so we divided into 3 groups to go to different stations
to learn stuff about prophets.
group 1: we had a puzzle, while they had to put together,
but we only let one person see the picture of what it was supposed to be. we
taught them that the prophets have a much wider view of the picture than us and
that they can help us see what to do. this one was fun to buy, we went to a
little shop and asked for their puzzle with the least amount of pieces, she
brought us one with like 19 pieces, a puzzle of a little kid princess show just
to show us the size, we told her, yeah that’s fine... we´ll take that one. i
think she thought we were crazy, but we just bought it for the pieces and
covered it with a picture from the liahona.
group 2:we had 2 seemingly impossible tasks, get a hard-boiled
egg into a bottle, and stack 14 nails on top of one nail. none of them could do
it until we showed them how, so we taught them that the prophets can guide us to help us do things we don’t
know how. (i won’t tell you how to do them, you can try it if you want, and
then when you fail, ask the missionaries and they can teach you how)
group 3 (my group): we gave them the option to choose
between oreos and peanuts, but i told them that the peanuts were better to
choose. some of them still went with the oreos, and when they went to eat them,
realized that we had taken out the cream and replaced it with toothpaste, the application
was pretty simple, when the prophets give us counsel we should follow it, so we
don’t end up with bad stuff like toothpaste (though actually most of the young
men liked them...cada quien)
then saturday we obviously went to conference, crazy that we
had 3 new apostles called at the same time, but they just seem like the right
people to take the position, so i guess the lord knows what he is doing. the
conference was great, i got more out of it by following advice that elder
bednar gave us, that when taking notes usually we just kinda write a summary of
their talk, but it is better to just write down the spiritual impressions that
we receive as we listen, that way it is applied much better to what you need
and they will continue to help you in the future (i don’t think I ever went
back to read my notes when i did it the other way.) just another quick thought,
i think the general authorities are reading my blog, because they totally stole
a bunch of ideas from me.
sunday.. we didn’t actually go, which was a bummer, but
elder m was pretty sick all of the sudden, so he was puking and stuff, so we just stayed at home. funny thing is that i think it was my
birthday pizza that did it, because i also had a bit of a stomach ache (but
without the puking and stuff) while elder m2, who ate no pizza was fine.
we went to the doctor today and got him some medicine, and i guess we´ll see if
he feels better tomorrow to go work.
well, that’s it for now, love you guys, be good.
elder gandola
