Sunday, December 10, 2017

An Evangelical Pastor - Round II

¡Familia!                                                                                                      
The BEST part of this week is that December has started! Our big focus now, as missionaries, is the Church’s initiative #LightTheWorld. Basically, our main purpose each day, other that teaching lessons we’ve arranged, is to spread this message to everyone we encounter.  One night this week, Elder Hobbs and I walked around and offered chocolate milk to people in our area and then once they were interested, we’d offer to show them the Christmas video that the Church made.  By sharing the message of #LightTheWorld we’re already full of Christmas spirit and it’s helped us get into more homes too.
On Tuesday, one of the Assistants came to our area to go on an exchange and see how Elder Hobbs and I are working together.  As it turned out, we didn’t have a lunch appointment on Tuesday, so we called the bishop to tell him that the assistant wanted to talk to him about the ward and missionary work. We made all of this up, just to get an awesome lunch from the bishops’ wife.  But, it worked perfectly because they served us a great meal and they had no clue that we set them up for lunch! Also, the bishop’s son, without knowing we’d brought the assistant to lunch, walked into join us and the first thing he said was, “This Elder has the face of an Assistant.”  Elder Hobbs and I were dying of laughter.  Our lunch date and exchange with the Assistant couldn’t have worked out more perfectly.
Since we had baptisms last week, we are desperate for a few more investigators. So, we spent a lot of timing knocking doors this week.  One night, as we were knocking doors, trying to share a Christmas video with people, we saw a little church tucked right into the middle of a neighborhood. At first, we thought the church was just a house, but right as we were about to knock on the door, we realized it was actually a church.  This made us hesitate to knock.  However, I thought to myself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” so we knocked and introduced ourselves.  The family immediately let us in and offered us pizza and soda and told us to make ourselves at home.  As we talked with the family, we learned that the man of the house is a pastor and he has his own church. He also told us that he is “Christo,” which means Christ in Spanish.  I was taken back and I actually thought, “This dude is nuts,” but then he clarified that his last name is Christo. Haha! We continued talking and then the man told us that he is a gypsy! So, he’s an evangelical Pentecostal pastor who is a gypsy! We had a good little chat and he took us on tour of his church.  During the tour, I started to play his piano a little bit and now he’s trying to get me to play for him every week. The whole thing was a pretty crazy experience but the man was so nice and we even left him with a Book of Mormon. As we were leaving the last thing he said was, “Quit preaching about Joseph Smith and become an evangelical pastor!” Elder Hobbs and I were dying of laughter. It was a pretty hilarious way to end the night.     
This week as we were teaching Augustin, we decided to focus our lesson on Miguel, his dad. Miguel has always been present during our lessons with Augustin, but since he is so focused on having Augustin listen to us, he really never thinks about applying our lessons to himself. So, this week, we specifically taught Miguel about baptism and the Priesthood and we extended a baptismal invitation to him and he accepted! It took some convincing to get him to take this step, but after church on Sunday he felt a lot more confident and he’s getting excited for his upcoming baptism!

Have a great week!                                                                 


Elder Roderick

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