Diligence

¡Buenos Días a todos! [Good Day to all!]

While I´m thinking about it, the weird foods of the week are fish eyes and turtle eggs. Question entonces [then]: are turtle eggs illegal en the States? They´re strangely really good. My companion hates them haha and almost started gagging in front of our investigators haha! Later our pension found out that I liked them and thought it was funny that Elder D** doesn´t, so she went and bought 35 so she could laugh at Elder D**. They´re super expensive, but really good. The fish eyes were the other week. Elder P** and I just decided to take out the fish eyes from the river fish that we had for lunch. (They serve it whole with the head and everything so you have to just pick out what you want, somewhat like the fish that we had in Cambodia). And I always felt dumb that I didn´t eat the fish eye from the first meal we had in Cambodia, so I had to do it here haha! I got Elder P** to do it too. It´s not too awful, but I don´t think I´ll be asking for a plate of them.

Anyway, on to some other stuff. No, I´m still here in Guayara. The date for the transfers has been changed a lot with all of the new missionaries that we´re expecting really soon. We didn´t have transfers in the end of August like we were supposed to have, and so we were going to have them this past week, but that changed to what is supposedly the 24th or something like that... Ya I don´t know anymore. We're so lost when it comes to things like that out here. Nothing from the mission really makes it out here to Guayara in its pure form haha. (I´m trying to send pictures from our little excursion (conference actually without any type of excursion) in Riveralta because the drive there is really beautiful........but my camera died. Lo siento [I'm sorry. Hay que esperar [You have to wait].

We have so many awesome investigators right now it´s just ridiculous! The only problem is that everyone in the zone has been sick the entire week including us and we can´t find the same people more than 2 times or something like that. Ah! But, we have one family that wants to get baptized and is resisting tons of rumors and opposition from family and friends and they just tell everyone that they aren´t going to be listening to all of that stuff because they know what they´ve felt and the changes they´ve seen in their family. YES! They are awesome. They just need to get married, that´s all. But they already knew that from even before we met them for the first time. They´re having lots of problems with their house right now and are trying to move to the other house that they have right on the river, which by the way is absolutely incredible the view there, but there´s lots of repairs to be made there first. They´re having lots of problems with money, but it´s amazing the different stuff that´s happening with their work and everything since they´ve been praying together as a family. We trying to help them move as soon as possible because they don´t have the money to keep paying the owner where they are now and she´s kicking them out really soon and there´s just lots of stuff happening, but they´re really trying to live and apply everything we teach them. Pray for them por favor [please]. They are amazing people with lots and lots of opposition right now. Just pray that they can overcome all of this please.

There were several moments this week when every single one of our appointments fell through and we seriously almost gave up and went home. No joke. We almost just sat down because there wasn´t anything to do and we had already contacted that area. Then every time that that happened, it just went through my head, don´t be stupid. There´s more people here that need our help. Diligence. And then with all of that going through my head I was thinking how dumb I was for being the one that prevented someone from hearing the gospel that day. One of these moments was yesterday and everything fell through in the end. BUT, we kept going. We almost went home because we´ve kind of been sick all week (I´ve had some weird allergic reaction to who-knows-what and that made it so my lymph nodes were inflamed and made it really painful to walk, and Elder D** has some weird disease with his eyes now that they were turning red and yellow and lots of other stuff, but don´t worry because we´re completely fine now and it´s just Elder D**´s eyes that are getting better still) but with all of that all week we decided to keep working because we didn´t want to be in the house. And anyway, so yesterday after we almost decided to give up but then decided to just make it through to the end and help everyone we could find last night, we ended up finding an inactive family that their kids aren´t baptized and it´s been really hard to find them recently, but their daughter had a really bad fever all day yesterday and we found them and gave a blessing to her, so hopefully that´ll help them out a little, and then we found one of the references that we have that we´ve stopped by his house 50 million times this week and wasn´t ever there, but he was there last night! He´s read a part of the Book of Mormon before and has listened to the missionaries before, but told us that there´s just no way that he could believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet if the Bible says that there´s no more prophets. We read Acts 3 (I´m pretty sure it´s 3) with him and after that he simply said, hmm...... I really have to think a little bit more now. And then later everything changed with him and the Spirit was really strong and we´re going back tonight! Ah! Sorry for the rambling. The moral of the story: diligence. I really learned what it means to be diligent this week. Sometimes that all we need to make the difference.

But hope everyone had a great week! Sounds like Homecoming was fun. Remember your scriptures, and don´t just read to read, but read and study, and studying by topic is even better. This week I´m studying the Articles of Faith in depth. It´s really interesting how broad each one is, but you´ll find that people´ll have the weirdest questions; things that we don´t usually even think about before. The only way to answer these questions later is to search out the weird questions first so that we can find the simple, basic answers to help them, and ourselves, understand. Hope that makes sense. It made more sense in my mind haha.

Love you all and hope you´ll all loving life. If you´re not, you´re doing something wrong.

Tenga una buena semana [Have a good week],

Con amor [With love],

Elder Groneman

The End. (of the book I just wrote I mean)