"A day without the spirit, is like a day without music."

November 7, 2016

We have been looking for new investigators.  We are trying to build up our teaching pool.  We have been teaching Mikel and her son, and we’ve been teaching other people in her house, including her cousin.  She’s been great.  She is reading the Book of Mormon, but can’t come to church today.  She has to work, but her cousin wants to come, and should bring Mikel’s son.  We’re going to help them get here. 

In this ward, church starts later, 12:00.  It’s strange for the coast, usually they start earlier.  It will make it hard for most people to come.  Coming to church should be all about your desire to attend, anything keeping you from church is really just an excuse, but we’ll help people.

We have been doing a lot of contacting this week.  It’s the first time on my mission that I have spent so much time just contacting random people.  Usually, in other areas, contacting was our back up plan if lessons fell through, but here, it’s all we’ve been doing.  It’s pretty much our plan A.  We did find 2 new families this week.  We hope they progress

We had another leader’s council this week.  It’s nice not to have to travel so far anymore, I don’t have to travel 6 hours every time now, it’s just 45 minutes.  We learned what President wants us to teach our zones.  So we’ll take his message to our next zone meeting and teach all of the missionaries the same lesson.  As zone leaders, instead of making up our own lessons, now we just need to teach them whatever President teaching us.   We had a lot of trainings.  We learned about prayer, and how to teach people how to pray.  It’s a great topic.  There is a lot of apostate ways people pray here.  Even some of the missionaries don’t always get it right  So we were taught how to kneel down, how to help them have a spiritual experience, and we did a lot of practicing. 

We also watched a video from Mormon.org.  There’s a video called “Nearer My God to Thee” but in Spanish.  It’s just a cool version of the hymn with a bunch of pictures of the Savior in the background.  They played the video for us without the sound.  And they didn’t tell us anything about it. They just showed us the pictures.  We were in total silence for 3 minutes.  Then they talked to us about what we learned, what we liked, and what viewing the video did for us.  They asked us how we felt, etc.  Then they played the video a second time, only this time we could hear the sound, and the words to the hymn.  We were all surprised.  It felt so different.  So then we had a great discussion about teaching with the spirit, vs without it. 

There are days when you don’t listen to the spirit, and it’s strange.  Like a day without music.  We had a great zone meeting.  There are 28 missionaries, and they are all really great.  Elder Sanchez was there, Elder Luis from Valledupar.  And there are finally some new North American Elders. 

Hope you will all work to have the spirit with you every day.  You can choose to do activities that invite the spirit, or  you can choose to do activities that make it go away. If you really want to progress spiritually, always choose activities that will allow the spirit to be with you. Obviously we don’t read our scriptures every minute of the day, but we can choose to be in good places, doing good things.  When we choose to do that, over and over again, we can grow spiritually. 

We went to bocas de senizas

Miguel finally got baptized!!!!!
It took 7 months of working with him!!!!