Simply ask God

Arrived Dec 12 2016

Love the family more than my Christmas package...I think. I haven’t actually opened it yet so we will see haha, just kidding. I made my companion check the list of what was in the box to see if I needed to put any food in the fridge so he knows what I got but im waiting until Christmas!

 

Me studying

We have continued teaching our investigator Hipolito this week. he was the one man we saw out on his porch with his friends who were out drinking but turned out to be a great guy who accepted the baptismal date and read. Well he dizque (supposedly) works all the time so we haven’t been able to teach to many times, but he reads and understands well. He is still excited for his baptism which should have been this Saturday but he hasn’t come to church. The Sabbath day is our next lesson.

We had a zone meeting where we also planned our Christmas skit for the mission party at the end of the month and celebrated the birthday of one of the senior couples.

Birthday party for one of the senior couples - Elder Decker

We have been working better with members recently but our investigators have been a roller coaster. Sometimes you have amazing lessons but then you can’t meet again for another week. This week was that missing week.

We find many amazing people nowadays. This week we made a contact in the morning and the young man was really interested and said he would call us, just in case we got his address....

Our intercambios or exchanges have been interesting this week. We did two and those were our two best days haha. Normally all the lessons fall through those days. In one of the intercambios we had fifteen minutes left in the day and I told Elder Nickel from Samoa that we were going to teach the first lesson in that time. We did well and the man understood well. I was really excited until we spent another fifteen minutes comparing the roots of the Haitian and Samoan peoples. His name is Jaime and he seems interested but one of those people looking for faults in the message that aren’t there.

 

The Zone

Friday was a hard day. I had received a call from president rescheduling our zones interviews with him. I had understood Saturday, but it turns out they were meant to be Friday. I got a call from him Friday morning asked where our zone was. After a really rough hour on the phone calling the zone leaders and assistants and president we figured it will have to be rescheduled again. It was really humbling having accept responsibility for the miscommunication and explain why we weren’t going to have interviews to the rest of the missionaries. We were all looking forward to it. Oh well, my self-confidence has since returned back to normal and things are great. But I really dislike cell phones now.

I have been frantically planning with just about every member I know who lives in the two branches here in Bonao this week. I have permission to go to Santiago to participate in Coronel De Luna’s baptism but I have to get a member for both my companion and me respectively, so the area keeps proselyting, but I can visit Bonao. As of now my companion has a companion but I don’t, and I am a little stressed. I will let you know how things go.

 

Call it Mission Control (for Bonao zone)

My companion and I were talking this week about how we really feel like missionaries these days. When you share the whole restoration and challenge people to baptism right off the bat, you feel like you are doing your part and you are actually less scared. It amazes me how truly awesome this message is yet simple. We challenge everyone to simply ask God if these things are true, and then follow the respective answer. I know and testify everyday that God loves his children and wants each one of them to follow his camino (path), by beginning with baptism. The fruits are slow to show but it feels great none the less.

I have been really focused on the great apostasy this week. I never understood the depth of it until now. Our religious ancestors went through so much and in the end only a weak resemblance of the simple truths remained but it was necessary. (2 Thessalonians 2:1-4) How great is it to know with a surety that Christ lives and this is his gospel. Everyone can know if the read the Book of Mormon and ask for confirmation.

Elder Sheffield