We found an AWESOME family where the mom and two children are church members but the dad and other son are not. They told us they really liked the family nights that they used to have, so we had a family night with them on Monday. My mom, for my birthday, being the sweet little woman that she is, sent my a cookie mix across thousands of miles. Ovens don't really exist here, so when I saw that this family had an oven, I was like family night.... cookie mix... oven.... LET'S MAKE COOKIES!!!! So we went to their home with glorious plans to make cookies (believe it or not they don't have cookies here) but turns out they were out of gas.... But I'm not a guy that gives up easily and the lack of an oven wasn't gonna deter my cookie ambitions. So we made the cookies ... on a frying pan stuck in a mud oven with the heat from burning cardboard. SO GHETTO. Not gonna lie and say that the cookies came out perfectly well. They actually all melted together into one giant cookie blob and half of it got really burned and the other half didn't even get cooked, but there was just enough sugar in the mix to make it taste good no matter what. We taught a lesson about the plan of salvation, and the Dad asked the BEST question ever. He asked if we would recognize each other after we die and if we would be able to be together as families? We told him we weren't sure; we had never really figured out or been told the answer to that question by modern day prophets.
PSYCHE! No, we told him OF COURSE! Families are engineered by a loving God with the point of being eternal! How terrible would heaven be without your brothers and sisters and parents and children? We testified that families can be eternal, but there is a catch. We seperated the family and sent the dad and brother outside of the house, staring in. We then gave the rest of the family the delicious semi-burned ubercookie. We asked the dad and brother how they felt outside in the darkness without cookies while the rest of their family was inside happy. Bad, and alone they said. We explained that that is how we will feel in the day of judgement if we don't take the necessary steps in this life (such as baptism) to return to live with God in his kingdom. We challenged the dad and brother to be baptized, and they accepted.
Other cool experiences... We helped a family we are teaching to earn the money necessary to get married by selling enchiladas and pastelitos de leche to the community and the church members. By the end of the activity, I was pretty bummed, thinking there was no way we had earned enough to cover the legal expenses of the wedding after paying for the ingredientes and everything, but when we counted the money we had earned, it was exactly what we needed to pay for the papers so they could get married and then baptized. It was truly a miracle and an answer to prayers.
 |
| Our sign to sell enchiladas and pastelitos to help a family get married |
Sunday night we were pretty tired because we had been walking for a while without finding anyone to teach. We had wandered pretty far up the mountain to try and teach a new investigator but she never came to the door. So we said a prayer to be guided to someone to teach. Not really feeling any obvious prompting, we decided we should walk a little bit more up the mountain, but no one let us in to teach. Feeling kinda foolish, we headed back down and I thought about that great mormon message with Elder Holland about taking the wrong road:
Keeping my faith that God would guide us to where we needed to go, we ended up at a new investigator's house that we had challenged, like everyone else, to read and pray about our message to know if it was true or not. He welcomed us in and the first thing he told us was "How did you know?"
"Know what?"
"That I would get an answer to my prayer!"
He told us that he hasn't had a dream in 3 years, but the night that he asked to know if the church was true he had a dream where his brother told him to go to the church. His brother died a few years back. Long story short: we taught him the plan of salvation and talked about the spirit world, where we go between death and the resurrection, and we talked about how the savior, in his infinite misery, has told us that the spirit world is a place of learning and waiting, and read with him 1 Peter 3:17-18 and 1 Peter 4:6.
We told him that there was a chance for his brother, that the gospel is being preached to the spirits in prison so that they may have the chance to be saved. Being a man's man and actually having a loaded pistol in his hand during the whole lesson, he didn't break into tears, but his eyes definitely moistened when we testified of that and thanked us for showing him those scriptures because for a long time he has worried and prayed that God would be merciful with his brother and give him a second chance. It was super cool. He accepted to get married to his wife and then be baptized by the correct priesthood authority afterwards.
I know we were guided to that house.
So those were some of the cool moments of this week.
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Moffitt
 |
| Elder Brimley and I enjoying our killer guacamole on our P-day. Avocados are in season--only 25 cents! |
Sweet Hammock, Sweet guac
ReplyDelete