Enchiladas, pastelitos, cookies, and weddings!

This week was excellent! We saw so many miracles and received so many blessings. I shall begin to count them. 

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:

https://www.lds.org/pages/mormon-messages#wrong-roads

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!

Be Prepared!

Hi there! Okay, interesting stories of the week...

1. A man walked up to us in the night and tried to give us his baby. Usually they ask us for money so that was kinda new. Unfortunately, we didn't have any baby food so we couldn't take her. Heartbreaking.

2. The other day we walked by right as some guy who was picking fruit way up high in a tree got electrocuted. The branch dipped and hit the primary line of the electric wires and the current hit him through the tree. Despite attempts to get him out of the tree and to the hospital, he died. 

It reminded me of the utmost importance of always being prepared and worthy to meet God because we never know when our time on this earth is up. It is like taking the most important placement test EVER (like the SAT for college admissions, but this is a test that will determine your ETERNAL HAPPINESS) and not knowing when the time will be up and they will call, "Put down your pencils!"  Would we spend our time drawing butterflies on the margins of the page or would we race to answer all of the questions and then sit back confidently to wait for the "times up" call?

This life is not all there is. It is just a drop in the ocean of eternity. How could we afford to--and why would we--waste a single second? Literally, eternal life depends on us being prepared. The scriptures tell us how. If you want to know how, talk to a missionary. But don't be caught unaware. Like the cub scout slogan: Be Prepared.

3. Made some killer guacamole with Elder Brimley. So good.

4. My favorite scripture now is DC 123:17:  

Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.

If we do all that is within our power, we don't need to be sad or stressed or anything; we can just trust in God and wait to see his miracles. I am so grateful that I don't need to worry about everything. I just need to obey the commandments of God and magnify my office and my service to the Lord.

Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Moffitt

This is our front yard and the bar bells that we exercise with each morning (concrete in cans)!

My awesome new companion, Elder Navas from Costa Rica.

Your Potential, Your Privileges:

We can partake of an abundant feast of spiritual opportunity 

and universal blessings!

Happy!

Well folks, I officially am the happiest missionary ever! I am once again a "father" here in the mission (or in other words I am training a new missionary) and I have the greatest companion ever!!! He is from Costa Rica and is so powerful, dedicated, and hard working. I feel like the Lord is just going to pour down a ton of obstacles and challenges but also a ton of blessings and miracles and success on us as we obey and pray with all our might and sweat our faces off out here!

One of our beautiful families we are helping to get married!

We are working with a lot of families to get married this upcoming month of August because legal weddings are free! They just need to pay for the necessary papers. (Well, kinda free.)

Just to give you all a glimpse into the missionary life in Honduras, we don't actually have a running water shower 90% of the time. Normally we just end up dumping buckets of freezing cold water on our heads, scrubbing ourselves as fast as possible with all soap within reach, and then dumping more freezing cold water on our head with a tiny plastic bucket to wash it all off. Overall a pretty miserable experience but hey, Honduras! Naw its a blast I promise. Definitely gonna keep up the tradition when I get back to the States. 

But even showering every day like that, I am super happy because I am doing the work of the Lord and, even though it's hard, if you focus on the good things you will be happy. You can only be happy on the mission if you serve and obey with all that you have.

Shout-out to my brother playing League of Legends in China right now!

Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Moffitt

Great times with my companion, Elder Lopez.

Training my new companion, Elder Navas from Costa Rica.

Moto-taxi to Salvacion!

This week was super awesome. For a while now we have been working with a sister who has lived, well, a super wayward life. We started teaching her and really struggled to help her because she wanted to change but didn't believe that she could. It was hard for her to read the pamphlets and scriptures we left her. She didn't have much hope. It came to the point that she told us that she didn't want us to come back because we were wasting our time and she couldn't change. I tried to listen really hard to the spirit because it was a critical moment. I asked her to hold on for just a little longer. To just go to church once more ... before she made that decision. I also asked if we could give her a priesthood blessing the next day of comfort and counsel. She agreed and after that blessing, literally everything changed. She found that part of faith that she lacked, HOPE. 

In Moroni 7 in the Book of Mormon it says:

"And again, my beloved brethren, I would speak unto you concerning hope. How is it that ye can attain unto faith, save ye shall have hope? And what is it that ye shall hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal, and this because of your faith in him according to the promise. Wherefore, if a man have faith he must needs have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope. And again, behold I say unto you that he cannot have faith and hope, save he shall be meek, and lowly of heart." Moroni 7:40-43

She started to believe that she could change, and started to work to make it happen. She started to read, slowly and not understanding much at first, and writing notes in her journal to understand better. She went to church each Sunday. She prayed and bore her soul to God. She, who before almost didn't talk to us, went in a taxi and talked to the mission president to resolve a worthiness issue. She is now a completely different person. 180 degrees different. And on Saturday, she entered the waters of baptism and was born again. Cleansed of all her past mistakes. Afterward I asked her how she felt. Peace, she said. I feel peace. I didn't feel like this before, but now I am happy and I feel peace.

The doctrine of Christ is that we can lay off the natural man and become children of God. We can become new creatures in him. Anyone who says that is "just who I am" or declares that they cannot change denies the power and gospel and central message of Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice. 

We. Can. Change.

I hope you all see me as a changed person as well when I get back.

Elder Moffitt

The missionary moto-taxi to salvation (with my companion, Elder Lopez, from Guatemala)!

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, shares how hope encourages and inspires us 

to place our trust in the loving care of our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.