During weekly planning we decided to talk to Andrés about
postponing his baptism a week to make sure his wife does it with him.
He said that would be wonderful. They prayed for a sunny day (it has
been cold and rainy) so that Antonia could come to church with the baby.
On the way they ran into Marlene Centurión, a recent convert who was
excited to find someone else going to our church, too. Just a few of the
miracles that have made them even more sure. They are such a converted
family. We reviewed the baptismal questions last night, and they are
110% ready. Antonia seemed very shy at first, and Andrés seemed like he
didn´t want to commit, but they have opened up, trusted in the Lord, and
they are now like our second family. Yes, I have a lot of second
families here in Paraguay.
So, if all goes well we´ll have three baptisms this Saturday.
Debora didn´t come to church, again. But her less-active father-in-law
did! Progress! That great family I mentioned last week pretty much tried
to drop us, but we were insistent, and they gave us permission to keep
teaching their children, who have lots of interest. We also had a great
experience reading the introduction to the Book of Mormon with a new
family, Cesar and Marcelina Insfrán, who had seemed very closed-off but
were very interested by Christ´s visit to America and the opportunity to
pray to know the truth.
I don´t normally mention the exchanges I do, but
know that we do exchanges just about every week. This week we did TWO.
One with Elder Ruiz, a Peruvian who was in my district in the MTC. He´s
working hard, but they don´t have much support from their members,
especially their branch president. Good news--In our meeting with
President Agazzani and the Stake President, one of the many things
accomplished was that President is going to take out the four
missionaries in that branch and put in two sisters. That should solve a
lot of problems.
I also did exchanges with Elder Velasquez, which was
interesting because we worked together once in Ciudad del Este--August
2012! It was his last Friday, and we were able to teach 8 lessons that
day. That kept him from thinking to much about home. He also sold me one
of his SD cards, which is good because the one that came with my camera
is full!
Oh, I also wanted to mention an eye-opening lesson I
had with Elder Ruiz. We ran into two atheists, who were very
intelligent, and knew quite a bit about the church. They mostly wanted
to mock religion, so we couldn´t achieve much. But the sad part was when
their 6-year-old daughter came out and said she also "used to believe
in God." It´s so sad to see a little girl talk about not believing in
God the same way she´d say she realized the Easter Bunny doesn´t exist.
Though I often do not agree with other religions (haha, that´s a light
way to put it), I am SO grateful to serve in a counrty where almost
everyone has the tradition of accepting that God exists. Besides helping
them live better, more hopeful lives, it saves us a lot of work as
missionaries.
Church was very spiritual yesterday, though there
wasn´t much about Easter. One of the bishop´s counselors talked about
the importance of talking to the investigators at church, something we
had shared with him at lunch the day before. Sorry I don´t have much
more time to talk about Easter traditions. I think I explained a lot of
that last year. They eat a lot of food and watch The Passion of Christ
all day.
They sold the house we wanted to someone else, so
we´ll have to keep working on that, along with everything else. And hey,
you do have other things to look forward to--like Mother´s Day and
Skyping your sons. Hope you enjoy it all! Love you lots!
-Elder Morgan the Older
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