Fruits of the Spirit: Peace, Love, and Joy

This week I really learned a lot about the Spirit. Here are some miracles of the week:

On Sunday last week, we passed a man sitting on the balcony of his house alone at about 7 at night. One tradition that I have is that I always like to contact males when they are sitting alone. It is usually the most spiritual part of their day and they are usually pondering or meditating or thinking about something so I always like to just ask them how they are what they are thinking and if they are sad and need someone to cheer them up. The two elders I was with and I passed the house and I thought, "naw, leave him alone. no talk to him. naw leave him alone. no come on talk to him." Never sure if they are my thoughts or the spirit, I sighed and, like I do 93% of the time, turned around and walked back to ask this guy what he was thinking. Always better to err on the side of the spirit. He chuckled and said he was fine, just tired. Surprisingly, he responded by asking me where I lived. I told him Tocoa. Long story short, turns out he lives in this wealthy house RIGHT in front of our apartment. I had tried to contact that house several times but it was surrounded by massive walls and no one ever came out. So here I am 50 miles away from my area and find my neighbor! I asked him when he was going back to Tocoa, and put an appointment with him. 

The next day, we went in the night to go visit him. He is about 25 years old, let us in and told us that he has made a lot of mistakes in his life and wants to change. We challenged him to be baptized, he accepted. 

This Sunday he came to church with us. Coincidence? No. God finds ways to get inside even the highest walls.

Made quacamole for an investigador family that we are teaching for family night. Nobody died. SUCCESS!

On Thursday we were in Saba, and our 2 citas cancelled, so when a kid tried to talk to me in English (they usually do and then run away laughing), I called him over and asked where he lived. He pointed to the distance and we asked him if we could visit his family. He said, sure, and started to guide us to his house. We passed by a school on the way there, and all these 6-8 year olds were at recess and when they saw us pass by. One of them asked us for a pamphlet, and then literally the whole entire 1st and 2nd grade came running and threw themselves against the fence asking and begging for pamphlets. It was pretty hilarious because it was like they had never seen missionaries before, which is probably true, but I only gave out 2 pamphlets, one to the boys and one to the girls, because I only had so many. I half expected them to rip each others arms off trying to read it but they all ran over to the shade and started reading. Awww.

Anyways, we got to the house of this kid who is 12 yrs old and turns out his mom went to the church before when she was young and is the neice of the only active and endowed member in all of Saba! What's more, turns out the dad (they are not married of course -- welcome to Honduras) is actually a member of the church. He was baptized as a youth but now has problems with smoking and is abusive and stuff. You have to believe that God guided us there because we are talking about finding her in a city of 20,000 people with no church members. 

Another miracle. On Friday, we went to Sonaguera to do divisions with the district leader there, Elder Dickson from Utah. We went to visit someone, no one was there, so we contacted a house and out came a 12 year old that had gone to the church once and was a friend of the recent convert we had gone to find. He let us in to teach him, and we asked him if he wanted to be baptized. He responded, yes, but in 13 years. Why so long? we asked and we explained what baptism is and why it is important. What if Christ comes before 13 years are finished? He understood perfectly, but was still unconvinced. So we asked him is he would pray and ask if he needed to be baptized in the church. He nodded with the faith of a 12 year old kid and prayed simply to know if he needed to be baptized in the church and thanked God for sending the missionaries. He paused, and then said the same thing over again, and finished the prayer. We looked up and tears were streaming down his face, and when we asked him how he felt, he said, Tranquility. Peace. He said firmly, I want to be baptized.

The fruits of the spirit of God are peace, love, joy. It is an enlightening influence that opens the mind and fills it with light and understanding. It touches the soul and makes the heart burn. It is real, true, precious, and  beautiful, and to be sought and prayed for diligently. Strong spiritual experiences are few and far between, but they cannot be denied. I wish to be able to teach more with the spirit, because the lessons in which the spirit is present are so much different than lessons that we are only teaching with our own understanding and knowledge. When the spirit is not there, everyone is bored. When the spirit is there, there is hunger to learn and understand. I love the spirit. I like the scripture in Heleman 5:30 about the influence of the spirit.

All those who sincerely and humbly pray to know if the church is true will feel that same influence. The same thing for those who pray about the Book of Mormon or to know if Joseph Smith really was a profet or a fraud, and everything else. God doesn't use visions and dreams when he can just whisper to our heart. If you don't feel an immediate answer to your prayer, keep looking and keep asking. It will come.

Other than that, had many other cool things happen, we had a baptism this week that was a complete miracle, but I will tell you all about that later. Love you all and please pray for the missionaries here in Honduras. 

And don't forget that I am in the murder capitol of the world. 

Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Moffitt 

Our Tocoa District

Our Zone. Yep, I coordinated the shirts. It's a thing we do here.

Just keeping us safe here in the jungle.

Book of Mormonopoly

Sorry guys, but I like never have time to write you all. Not that you are second priority but, yeah, actually you kinda are. I have to be focused on the work of the Lord here and am always so busy designing teaching aids, helping missionaries, sending datos, and other missionary things I just don't literally have time to write you all. 

This week started good with a lesson on Monday with a youth who just straight up told us he wants to be a member of the church so we taught him about baptism and he accepted. Cool. 

I have learned how to walk here in the mission. I fly. Honestly we don't have bikes or anything. We just walk dusty streets all day so we have to go fast to really get a lot done. 

Thursday we went to Saba again, that city we are opening, and had several people come up to us and ask us about the church because they had had contact with it beforehand. I love it when people ask us how much a Book of Mormon costs. FREE!!!!!!

I went on divisions there in Saba with a returned missionary that I knew in San Pedro Sula that moved here to Saba and pretty much the whole time he was just philosophizing about marriage and how to find and choose the perfect spouse. yeah...

But it was good and we had a lot of good lessons. It is hard trying to get people to show the faith necessary to travel an hour to go to church, and to get them to understand that there is something so special and important about this church, that it is literally the Church of JESUS CHRIST, that it deserves traveling that far instead of going to one of the many churches here. But Sunday we had 3 men investigators come to church from Saba. It was sweet.

Saturday night, we went crazy and called like every number we had written in our agendas to try and get people to go to church the next day. On Sunday, we went extra early and passed for like 50 people to go to church with us, and no one wanted to. You get used to stuff like that in the mission so I wasn't that affected by it, but it is always pretty sad to know that you have the pearl of great price and that people don't want it.

Sunday afternoon, we grabbed our lunch and hopped on the bus to go to Trujillo and do divisions with the elders there. Can you imagine eating rice and beans on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland? What about Space Mountain? Well, combine those two and you get the bus ride to Trujillo, and me trying to eat my lunch on the bumpiest road in history. My rice kept messing with me and jumping off my fork right into my eyeball.

Trujillo is beautiful and after a hard day's work on Sunday with the elders there, we woke up Monday and helped the elders deep clean their house, which was really quite exemplary in its dirtiness. The toilets were, impressively enough, the worst I have seen in my entire mission. I bought muriatic acid and showed them the power of the holy destructor, aka muriatic acid. That stuff is so powerful you put it down and it literally shouts a war cry and gives a quick battle speech and then goes and slaughters every germ within a 10 foot radius. It literally smokes and sounds like cooking bacon. I don't even know if it is legal in the U.S. but this stuff goes hard. Then, after the spirit once again could enter their house, we went and studied the scriptures on the beach on the perfectest day ever. So I'm not super jealous for your Rocky Point trip family -- I was on the beach too, just didn't go swimming. and it was only 2 hours, but still...

So I had 2 brilliant business ideas this week -- one was Book of Mormonopoly, or a Book of Mormon themed monopoly game if you couldnt figure that out for yourself. BRILLIANT!!!!!! Put that in Deseret Book in the family night section and it is gone. Can you imagine the Black Friday crowds?

2nd brilliant idea came this morning. We had doused and scrubbed the shower floor with muriatic acid so you literally couldn't enter the bathroom without a Darth Vadar mask. But I wanted to shower so I stuck the fan in the bathroom and went for it -- freezing cold bucket shower of course. But as I walked out, a wonderful wall of air hit me and I just dried off with the fan. So my idea was this sort of high velocity air jet body dryer thing that you stand on and it just shoots air up in this wind tunnel and dries you off in like 30 seconds. I was so pumped about it and already had my degree in mechanical engineering and then an MBA in business just to launch this business called Cyclone with this crazy body dryer planned and was already making advertizements for it when I told shared my idea the person here in the internet and they looked it up and turns out it already exists.

So.

Depressed.

Back to the get rich quick drawing board.

The church is True, Christ is our Savior. We are working with several families to get married and trying to keep all of our recent converts active and strong in the church, enduring to the end.

Some scriptures for you all:
 - Mom:  Acts 9:34

-  Dad:  Romans 16:18

- Jessica:  Lucas 14:26

- Chris and Clara:  I'll look for some for you guys this week!

Hurrah for Israel!

Love,

Elder Moffitt

Zone Conference coming up!

Quick message as I have to prepare for a zone conference tomorrow and try and review the USC class options that you sent. Please communicate my love for the family and that I will write next week. This week we had a special conference with Elder Neil L. Anderson. Shook his hand. Cool deal. Will write more next week.

Thanks for the help with college registration. If you could, please send me a list next Monday with several possible major requirements and some commentary for why it would be a good major for me. Let's see how good you are, missus college counselor. :) That way I can print it out here and read it and ponder and pray about what major I want to firmly decide on and pursue. Thank you!

Love,

Elder Moffitt

Brownies and Ice Cream and Hot Showers, Oh My!

Dear Family and Friends,

This week went very well. Elder Duncan, the Area President from the first Quorum of the 70, came and we enjoyed a multi-zone confernce on Thursday. And then on Friday, my companion and I went to San Pedro Sula to stay the night in the AP house with the other zone leaders before our meeting the next morning. Elder Brimly, Elder Clouse, and I, all three from Arizona (!), decided to take advantage of the OVEN that is in the misison house and make BROWNIES. Like no one here in Honduras has an oven (and if someone does have an oven, it is always broken or they don't have gas for it). So we made like 5 tons of brownies and bought ice cream and ate hot brownies with ice cream until we puked! Then I took the first actually HOT SHOWER that I have had for almost 600 days in which there was warm water falling from the wall onto my body. For 600 days I have either dragged a bucket of freezing cold water into my house and repeadedly dumped bowlfuls on my head while scrubbing myself (yes mom, I use shampoo) and weeping profusely -- or stood and cried under a freezing cold stream of water pouring from an open PVC pipe in the wall. Both ways are far from ideal. But actually, my hot shower surprisingly wasn't all that satifying. All this time I have been dreaming of a nice warm shower, and when I actually took one again, it was like, yeah? that was it? The thing I learned is that the work that I am doing is a lot more important than hot showers, and so, yeah, cold water stinks for an Arizona boy, but it is worth it for the Lord. 

The next morning we had a leadership meeting with Elder Duncan in which he called us all to repentance and taught us about how we have to know our sheep, like Christ knows his sheep. Our sheep are not just our investigadors, but also the investigators of our missionaries in our zone, and also the missionaries themselves. Lots of people to be thinking about!!!!  We need to know if our missionaries are progressing or not. Also, one thing that the spirit taught me in the conference was the difference between our baptismal date as missionaries and their baptismal date as investigators. Sometimes we try and force baptisms to achieve monthly goals. We give dates based on our own desires. This week, we felt that we should explain to one of our investigators that she could choose her own date. The lesson started with her telling us that when we first met with her, she was not living the law of chastity, but when we mentioned it in the first lesson, not teaching it but just mentioning the importance of not comitting fornication, she stated that she felt something that she had never felt in all her years of hearing other churches preach against fornication. She talked to her boyfriend, ended the relationship, and said that she felt peace and she felt free now that she had left that behind.  We were very impressed and felt that her repentance was sincere and told her that she was ready to be baptized this next week, which was the date we had set with her, or choose her own date. She looked at the calender, thought about is, and decided she would like to be baptized on the 28th of March. The spirit flooded the room in the church (we were teaching the lesson in the chapel). It was tangible. We asked her if she felt it and she smiled and nodded and said that she felt it. It was a lesson and testimony to me of that principle, of the importance of letting the investigator DESIRE to be baptized, like the people that heard Samuel the Lamanite  DESIRED to be baptized and went to look for him to be baptized (Heleman . I would love to just sit outside my apartment and wait for people to come to us to be baptized, but it is not always that easy; we have to look for people and help them gain that desire, but when they have that testimony and that desire, we need to let it work in them and let them use their agency to work their own salvation.

Yesterday we taught a sweet quick lesson with a great college kid named Hector. We taught about the Book of Mormon and I felt the impression that we should watch the Mormon Message about the Book of Mormon with the black bishop in England. Being the high tech missionary that I am, I whipped out my handy dandy usb that my awesome mom sent me, and him being the awesome college kid that he is, whipped out his laptop and we watched it. It was super cool because he liked it a ton and gained practically an instant testimony of the Book of Mormon and said that he was going to share that video on his facebook wall.  He commited himself to really study the book today and tomorrow and we will visit him on Tuesday to talk about what he has learned and felt. Really, the Book of Mormon has so much power.

Check out this sweet video about the story of Alma and Korihor in the Book of Mormon that is super aplicable to our society today: 

https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2012-08-2257-all-things-denote-there-is-a-god?lang=eng

We have a lot to do in our area and in our zone. We will be working with our district leaders this next week to devise a plan de zona and put it in practice.

Hurrah for Israel! 

Elder Moffitt

This is Elder Castillo de Nicaragua, my companion, and me taking a photo op in La Ceiba on the way to our conference. I have had companeros de Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatamala. I just need a companion from Honduras and one from Panama to cover all of Central America!

Miracles!

MY FAMILY!!! AND FRIENDS!!!!!!

Everything is good here in Honduras. What happened this week .... 

Just spent the whole week teaching the restored gospel of Jesus Christ! What could be better? We had several awesome lessons this week, one with this black college student that we taught the restoration and after was like, yeah, I believe it, and I was like, umm well how much do you believe it, from 1 to 10? And he said, 8. So I said, well, do you believe it enough to be baptized by someone holding that priesthood authority? And he was like, yeah, yeah I do, I'll do it. The only problem is that he studies in the university on sunday mornings when church is. Darn..

Pretty much the routine of missionary work is, first, testimony, then afterward, desire, then afterward overcoming all of the obstacles that stand in the way of someone being baptized. First, someone needs to believe that it is true, then they need to have the desire to change and act upon that message and then we just go 1-on-1 with Satan to try and get them ready to be baptized. Many are lost in that battle, because they don't have the strength or faith to do all they need to do to be ready to be baptzed, but the saddest is when people just don't have the desire. 

I love being a missionary and we are working super hard to keep our zone together. Miracles always accompany us. This is the work of God and he leads it. 

The weeks just go faster and faster. Honestly. Sorry for writing such lame emails but everything just blends into this blur of salvation and apostasy. 

Prayers!

Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Moffit

The gospel of Jesus Christ:

1. Faith in Jesus Christ

1. Repentance

3. Baptism by immersion

4. Recieve the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands

5. FIGHT ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!