November 23, 2015

 

Looks like a blast, great pictures. Cold, dry air, mountains, I´d love to be there. Keep those pictures coming, everyone is looking so big. Especially Kent and Jennifer´s kids, holy cow! Tell everybody I said hi and that I love and miss them. How´s Orrin doing? He told me he´s pretty excited for the coyote hunt as well, how do you all think he´s doing? we still talk pretty regularly. 

So, I´m short on time, been running zone leader errands all day, so I´ll just go ahead and shoot you the update. 

Kinda been struggling this week. Not personally, but as a leader. As in, the zone is struggling. Kinda feeling inadequate. Actually, inadequate isn´t the word, cause I´m relatively capable-this week kinda just sucked because I didn´t do everything I could have. I didn´t go hard. I´m always working, but I just feel like I could have done more and it´s not a really good feeling. But, at 6 pm I´ll be starting a new week and i´m ready to go. 

Also, this week I´ve really seen how the mission is more about baptisms and growing the church. It´s also about being a friend to the friendless, taking interest in people´s lives, truly listening, supporting people, and kind of being the hands of the lord-trying to bless people´s lives through our visits and interactions. This week was terrible numbers wise but I can honestly tell ya that we made a big difference in the lives of a grandmother who is divorcing, a little boy named fabrigas, and a woman from tegucigalpa who found us by chance in the hospital and needed a blessing for her mother. 

Also, by the calm tone of your emails I´m guessing the mission never called you all! So we got robbed the other night-no biggie, we shouldn´t have been walking up that street late at night-just a quick incident, man with a gun says give me what you´ve got and we give it to him and he´s gone, no worries (and I was just starting to get over my racist tendencies). The problem is that the AP´s called us to give us the transfers and the robber answers and says ¨mira puto, we already killed the owners of this phone¨. So, the AP´s freaked out and started calling up the stake presidency and they mobilized the ward and the whole ward is driving around looking for us, while we are continuing with our nightly visits calm as could be. And, as luck would have it, our last appointment ran late and we end up getting to the house at 10. We round the corner and there´s a bunch of trucks and people outside our house and we had a little ¨oh shoot¨moment. Even our cook was there looking for us (her name is mercedes btw and I love her to death). Then we talk to everybody and everything calms down. It was weird though, I loved the experience. It was one of those rare moments that I absolutely loved the mission and wanted to stay in Honduras forever. It felt like a privilege to be robbed-a privilege to suffer a little bit. I know it sounds strange but walking home that night I wanted to be a missionary forever and save the whole country. 

Also, the mission´s rough sometimes. This week I washed my clothes with dish detergent and then set to thinking about how far I´ve sunk. 

That´s about all the interesting we´ve had for this week. Also went to a birthday party, and we had the job of manning the piñata. Lot of fun. 

Also, I want some advice. We´re working with this really cool family-the wife is a member, the live-in is not-they´re a riot and they´re always just bothering the heck out of us, making fun of eachother and all, and we have a good time together. I love their kids to death. The wife is a great woman that has had some bad experiences with the church, and for these experiences the husband doesn´t want to get baptized. What happened was that she, about a year ago, started fornicating with her boyfriend-in her house-and the bishop came to visit her to call her to repentence and her mom kicked her out of the house-so she shacked up with the boyfriend and they feel that the ward members ignore them and exclude them and they didn´t recieve economic help when her mother got sick and her family (including the stake president) doesn´t approve of her live-in because they´re not married. Shocker. The problem is, they feel so offended, so wronged-they even cried in front of us about how much they were hurt-that they truly struggle going back to church, much less baptsim. What should we do? We are very clear with our purpose, that we are there to call them to repentence, and we have talked about their situation from every angle. We started off on their side and consoling them and then when we learned more and figured out what pendejos they´re being we got pretty blunt-but nothing changes. What should we do? The goo thing is we won´t damage our relationship with strong words (and if we do, we´re not here to make friends, we´re here to save them) so we can be pretty blunt. Love hasn´t worked nor has fire and brimstone. 

That´s all I got for you all. I´m gonna get some pictures of Mercedes and some other friends here next week. 

I love you all and am thrilled you´re having such a great time back in old zion. We´ll have to repeat that vacation one day. Be safe and keep the pictures coming!

Love, Elder Hansen