Elder Sanders

Elder Sanders

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

It snowed ! week 91 / 8 weeks left

A great and mighty greeting to one and all!  It`s a pleasure to write you everyone once more!  

So, first things first!  
-Congrats to everyone that made the temple trip this last weekend!  What a great experience, our ward is going to go the temple at the end of the month, but it`s a shame that we won`t be able to go with them.
-And I`m greatly enjoying the spoils from last Monday!  I started to read the book you sent me for my birthday, about the continuous conversion, and it is great.  We also managed to find and buy a strawberry cheesecake on Monday to finish off the celebration, but unfortunately, I remembered we live in Ecuador and that $14 cheesecake was awful! Blaugh!  But we still had a jolly good time.

AND ALSO!  This Sunday is the Mother`s day call! So, we are going to do it in the afternoon, around 4:00, so be ready!   

And as a notice to the title of the email, we did get snow here in the Ecuador!  It`s just a little harder and more frozen, accompanied with a violent lightning storm.  Most people just call it hail.  So yes!  On Thursday our sector got totally destroyed!  (Not literally, but the storm was a once it a lifetime kind of thing!)  We had to run home through the cold little hail pellets, and it was rather like running through a hundred man air soft war, and then the front of our house turned into a river of ice and water!  And was sweeping mightily!  We were very glad we were inside.  I hope you enjoy the photos.

But aside from that fun day, we have to wait yet another week to baptize the Family Z!  They were just waiting for one of their clients from work to pay them so that they could get married, but the person didn`t show up until the weekend!  Too late!  The wedding place closes on Friday!  So we must wait another week, but they WILL BE BAPTIZED!

We also did find a sweet Haitian family last week, who consist of 2 sisters and a brother who are from Haiti, and whose mother lives in the Bahamas. During the first lessons, the eldest sister named D (french name) told us that only a week ago she had lost her baby daughter, and through the doctrine of Christ we explained about the plan of salvation and how living the gospel of Jesus Christ ensures that we can live with our families together forever.  And they accepted baptism!  All went well until Saturday, when D later explained that she actually felt anger towards God and would not attend church, but would keep listening to us.   So we hope this next week she will change her heart!

We also have been teaching a few other investigators, a family of Adventists from Peru, a husband of a less active member, and the 9 year of from the partial member family.  

So many good things are happening, but Elder Bloxham and I are striving for more!
  Lately, although we`ve been having success, we`ve been poorly using our time and not being as successful as we could be.  SO, once again, we are going to do a 40-day fast-like purification.  So, during fast Sunday, we made an extensive list of all the things that have been inhibiting us from being the best missionaries that we could be, and then covenanted that we would strive to Not do those things for the next 40 days, which is pretty much until the end of our missions.  So, we hope that by the process, we can be, in a sense, more purified.  We just started today, and will be updating you on how our process is doing.

Thank you all for your prayers and support, you all mean so much to me too!

-Elder Sanders

ps.photos: my last birthday cake of the mission, some shots of the hail storm that struck the city, and some homemade corn dogs we made today