Happpppppyyyyy Wednesday everyone. Hopefully your week was a good one.
Today there's finally sun. FINALLY! Mamma mia... We're taking advantage of the sunny day and going up to Città Alta to take some pictures. Next week I'll finally send you pictures of these great scenes I keep telling you about. I'm happy that Spring is coming around.
I'd like to share an experience we've been having lately with bringing members to lessons. As missionaries, we are generally encouraged to bring members of our congregation to lessons with those who are investigating the church. Missionaries are generally only in one place for several months and then they leave. Members are much more permanent and are able to help these investigators and new members in ways that the missionaries never would be able to do. Usually throughout my mission, I've brought similar members to similar investigators. Ex: Young people to other young people, Bolivians to Bolivians, Italians to Italians, etc. Two weeks ago in ward council, one of the members brought up the fact that our congregation seems to be divided by race. The Bolivians usually sit with the Bolivians, the Africans usually sit with the Africans, and so on. She said that it made her sad to see such division and that this also creates a problem for new converts, especially those new converts who belong to a minority group. "Just as they come with the missionaries, so also they leave with the missionaries" she said. We decided we would do what we could to break up this division. We've been teaching a Bolivian family. Usually we had been bringing Bolivian members with us, which was working well. We thought we'd do something a little differently though. This week we invited an older Italian brother to come with us. Not only did the lesson go way better than expected, this member was really able to bond with this family and he even got the children involved. (As a side note, their eleven year old daughter is now an investigator and is progressing just as well, if not better, than the parents!) Because they live in Città Alta and the public transportation doesn't run very frequently up there, one of our biggest challenges has been getting them to church. The member we brought with us was more than happy to offer them a ride. The mother of this family was able to come to church this Sunday, and next Sunday the daughters will be able to come too. This experience made me think outside of the box a little bit. It was good for the investigators and it was very good for the member as well. He bore testimony in church about how grateful he was to have accompanied us on our teaching visits and he invited the other members to make themselves available to the missionaries as well.
Church this week was great! Between us and the sisters in our branch, we counted ten non-members in church. For our area, that's pretty extraordinary. One family that we had stopped teaching decided to show up in church. That was very exciting. A few were people who have been coming for a while. Some of our investigators have basically become members, they just haven't been baptized yet. Hah! All in all, it was a great Sunday and we hope to be able to repeat it.
One other neat experience was seeing David really fall in love with the Book of Mormon. At first he wouldn't read it. We were trying to think of ways we could help him understand. Every Saturday, we have a "family night" for the branch. It was our turn to give the lesson this week. What we did was we gave everyone a piece of paper and asked them to write a letter to their loved ones. It was meant to be a "final words" kind of thing, but they were only allowed 25 words in total. We collected the letters and set them aside in a box labeled "trash." Obviously, this caused some negative reactions. We said, "Imagine that your loved ones receive this letter, but they decide they don't have time to read it and set it aside. How does this make you feel?" We wrote down some reactions and then told them that this is how God feels when we do not read our scriptures. You see, the scriptures are letters that God has written to us through his servants the prophets. They are meant to be personal revelation for us. When we set them aside and let the less important things in our life take control, we miss out on the blessings that God could have given us. God is always waiting to bless us and He's given us everything we need, but if we do not act, we cannot receive blessings. Food for thought.
I love you all. Have a great week. -Anziano Simcox
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