Elder Western Union

Hey!

Sounds like a fun week. The caving pictures were way cool! And Hailey sounds like she's been doing some crazy partying out there. Hopefully the new ward will work out well, and the lady that mom is visiting with the missionaries will really start believing! Sounds way cool. And thanks Dad for the tips and scriptures. Also, grandma webster emailed me, I should have time to reply but if not, thank you!

So this week was pretty good. In fact, you know what is really weird? I'm not sick yet. Everyone I talked to before I left was always telling me how sick I'd get the first few weeks. I haven't even used a water filter once! (not sure if you'll be happy to hear that). So thats pretty cool. They eat a ridiculous amount of chicken here, so I guess you could say I'm starting to get a little sick of that, but whatever. 

Haha other random thing, I don't remember if I've said this or not, but spanish people seem to find it physically impossible to say "webster." Haha I haven't heard my name pronounced right in a long time. Haha almost everyone calls me "Elder Western Union" because its the only thing they've ever heard that sounds like my name. So thats fun. Thats even how they announce it at church. Another weird thing here is the money. ATMs give you pesos in $100 bills, which is only worth like $15 dollars, but its like impossible to get change for that. People here hate change. Whenever we want to change a $100 we have to go buy something, and the people will literally take everything out of the csah register and their wallet in order to make change. And if a store can't give you exact change, sometimes they'll just offer you some candy/mints to make up for it. So thats fun.

This week has been pretty cool though. There's a bunch of guys that are always drinking and smoking marijuana that we see hanging out all the time and they always try to invite us to do a bbq sometime. I also met this girl that told us this long sad story about her life and then started to try talking me into giving her my watch. We actually ran into her twice in the same day, and the 2nd time she was singing to us about how drunk she was and asked for our watches again...so, yeah. I feel like there's more stuff happening, but its starting to feel more normal so none of it really stands out. But seriously, its amazing what kind of private information random people on the street will tell to missionaries and how much certain people like people from the US. Oh, and someone mentioned the weather. Its like about 30-35 C every day...whatever that means. Kind of reminds me of summer in Arizona, except that its only spring here.

Dad was asking for more about investigators. There is the family Sosa that we are working with. The wife (Laura) and son (Ramero) have baptismal dates and the husband is a less-active, but they need to get married first, so hopefully they decide to do that. There is Aldana who goes to catholic school but refuses to stick with the catholic church because she says it doesn't feel right and she loves listening to us. This week she invited her friend Guadalupe to a lesson, and Guadalupe loves it to. Aldana told us that before Guadalupe met us she thought mormons were brainwashed, but now we've taught her twice, seems eager to come to church with us, and loves participating in lessons. We also met the family Muñoz this week. They've had some recent deaths in the family and seem interested, but we haven't been able to sit down and really teach them yet. There's the girl Milagros, who is the grand-daughter of a recent-convert. She was supposed to get baptized this upcoming weekend, but she ended up not coming to church yesterday because her uncle got out of jail this past week and they wanted to be with him, although they say they want him to meet with us.  Those are the main people we've been working with, but we're always looking for more people.

As a verse of the week, how about Ether 12:4. It says that faith in God includes hope in a better world. We shared this in our first lesson with Guadalupe and I started explaing more about it. I hadn't really thought about it like this before, but as I was explaining it, I started explaining how faith in God really does mean hope in a better world and a better life, but if you want a better world/better life, you aren't going to find it by sitting around doing nothing. You need to do something. Then we started talking more about going to church and baptism. But seriously, I was thinking about that, and God can't really bless you if you're not obeying. He's given us agency between good and evil. As a God of justice, He literally can't go blessing people that are choosing evil. It would take away their agency, because they wouldn't be getting what they chose. Obviously people who aren't obeying all the commandments can still get promotions or have nice houses, but He literally can't give you eternal life with Him if you refuse to choose it, even if He wants to give it to you (which He does).

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Anyway, I hope you guys have another awesome week! I'll be praying for you! Good luck with school, work, missionary work and other church stuff, and everything else you're going to do! You're trip to CO isn't for a week or 2, but good luck with that too! I'll try to send some pictures today too in another email.

Les Amo

Élder Webster