Dearest Family! Merry Christmas, I hope you are all enjoying the cold weather there while I enjoy the warm weather here!
It's been another exciting week with many ups and downs. The struggle with the language continues but gets better everyday. I am learning a lot of patience and humility which you know is something that could do me a lot of good. Sometimes we try to do more than we are capable of and end up doing more harm then good. Sometimes I think God just wants us to work our hardest and then be patient. As long as we are exactly obedient and working our hardest The Lord will take care of the rest. If he needed me to be fluent now I am sure that would be the case. If he needs me to understand what people are saying as long as I have done my part he makes it so. It really is coming but I just want to do and say so much but I can't... Yet. I know it will come because I saw this happen in Tacloban but it's taking a little more patience and a lot more humility this time maybe because I feel like I should be farther along than I am.
We have been teaching two kids from a less active family, The T. Family. We are hoping that as we help them towards baptism we can help their family towards reactivation. We were teaching them this past week and the lesson was about prophets and we were focusing on the kids but one of the less active members asked how exactly Thomas S Monson talked to God. If it's literally face to face or what. As usual my companion tossed the difficult question to me. I honestly didn't really know. Do we really know exactly? But I just talked about how we don't know exactly and I discussed Faith and the Brother of Jared and how even if we don't know exactly how he talks to God we need to have faith that he does and then exercise the faith to follow what he says. I felt bad that it was such a vague answer but that was the best that I could do. Shortly after this lesson we had a less active try to tell us that the Burning Bush was Satan and I couldn't completely understand or that Moses was evil or something because we were trying to explain the 10 commandments and how they're being fulfilled in Jesus Christ. I'm not sure what kind of burning bush he was smoking but he just needs to come back to church. He's one of these old guys who think they know everything. I always want to ask him if he knows it why he won't do it but hopefully we can help him and his family return and also help them get their doctrine straight.
Our investigators are doing well. We only have one now though because sister G. moved into the sisters area for work and so they are going to finish teaching her. I am glad she is still in the same ward and I am still going to think of her as one of my converts. Sister B. is also doing well, we have had a hard time finding opportunities to teach her though because we don't always have an adult male to work with us but we teach her when we can. The R. family however is a little more difficult (they are a part member family as well and we were teaching their two teenage sons.) I think they were more converted to Elder D. then to the Gospel and so now they have started hiding whenever we come which is really sad and it breaks my heart but we will continue to try. We pray that they will soften their hearts.
I baptized my first person on Sunday morning. The baptism was supposed to be on Saturday but something came up and it got pushed to the next day. It was a really neat experience. I even did it in Tagolog. So I had to do it twice because her foot came out of the water because she forgot to bend her legs like we instructed. So that made it memorable. The spirit was strong. The sisters taught her but I was honored to have the opportunity to baptize her and participate in her confirmation.
I have been thinking a lot about hope lately and faith also. We taught a lesson to a less-active family about hope The M. family. The wife and kids are more active than the dad and he's the one we want to focus on but he's never home and their marriage is struggling. We taught about hope and used the scriptures Ether 12:4 and also Moroni 7:41-43. We asked her what she hoped for and she said that she hoped for repentance and forgiveness and I thought that was a neat thing to hope for. That is something we should all hope for especially if we understand hope's close relation with faith. Hope is the reason and faith is the action. When we hope for something, faith is how we achieve that something so if we hope for repentance and forgiveness and then exercise faith, through the atonement of Jesus Christ we can surely achieve it.
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