And Little Children will Lead them...

Dear Familia,  

                                                                                               

So I guess I won´t ask the investigators’ grandpa for caoba, but he made it sound super exotic and unique to here. I´ve always had that a little bit in mind, looking for exotic woods for Grandpa Andy. I always remember his story of the muebles (furniture) he made from the Hawaiian wood he and Grandma had, and then the pens he makes for us and their unique origins. If you do end up getting pants or shirts, short sleeve shirts, with maybe one long sleeve, and I have about all of my pants that go with browns and greens for ties and only one pair of grey pants. I´d like some gray pants and maybe a few different colors now that the mission guidelines have changes, lighter colors are totally okay now and that’s intriguing to me, especially right now when its super hot out. 

I did get the package on the 12th, the day before hump day, no worries. The tie is great, the tootsie rolls don´t exist here, so Elder Viza didn’t know quite what to think about them. The music is great, it´s always good to mix things up. Elders here are big fans of the Nashville tribute albums, even though they don´t know what it says until they have a gringo to write down the lyrics during language study time. Also, any idea why there are two new films now in the temple?

Our zone in this next transfer will be growing to 20 missionaries, 8 of which will be sisters. Just thought I´d mention that because you had mentioned there are a lot of sisters heading our way. As well, the mission received a couple of married missionaries from you wouldn’t guess where: Nampa Idaho. They knew what Wheeler Circle was and at least know what stake grandma and grandpa are in. They are great and will be serving a regular proselyting mission, currently in the Independencia zone.

As for the hymns in church, some of the other north American missionaries and I had had this conversation during the week. The hymns carry the same power, but only when you think of it as a devotion to God. The hymns aren´t sung in parts in sacrament meeting, I remember that in our sacrament meeting their was at least a good group of members that sang in parts and when men and women divided it was very distinct. Here, 100% of the people sing the melody, even if it’s too high for them to sing it well. When there is a great difference in the tone, they do gigantic slides to get there, and generally the hymns are sung at a different timing than in English, sometimes on a minor tone as well. It´s very different, but they sing with all of their heart and so it doesn´t matter that it’s not like it was written. I honestly can´t think of the English lyrics to quite a few hymns, even ones that I thought I would never, even forget, but sometimes the Spanish lyrics makes more sense, or brings added meaning, the same as when I think about the Spanish scriptures, though many of the visiting authorities tell us the English Book of Mormon is exact and we ought to learn English to study it, reading the Book of Mormon in another language deepens your knowledge of what happens, what it means and that its true. I finished reading it for the second time in castillano on the 13th, hump day and every time I read it I know it’s true, I feel impulsed to testify point out the details I´ve noticed, show the doctrines I´ve learned. Now my project is to read the New Testament, something I honestly haven´t done since my freshman year of high school. I´m now in Marcos and reading about the Savior´s life changes you. Coming to know Him on a more personal level can´t be just through scripture study, but through an honest search to understand His divine mission and how we can exemplify him, we start to change who we are. I feel energized, ready to leave behind bad habits, and more fully obey his call, Venid y Ved. (Come and See)

White Afternoon is in full swing. The plan was that during the first two weeks of the transfer we would focus completely on finding a massive amount of people, through members, previous investigators, part families, less actives, and contacts. Then the next 4 weeks until the last week of February (this week) we would teach them and prepare them to be baptized. This is a zone push, and the final number of people we are baptizing arrives at 25 I think, and it’s been not quite true to schedule. It’s been a test of faith, we didn´t find hardly anyone that had a true interest in the church for the first two weeks. Then we found Jean Paul, he’s 9 years old and the grandson of active members. His mom has to work on her partner so that he can get divorced from his first wife and then married to her so that in the future they can be baptized, but Jean Paul will show them the way. Lots of couples we meet are in that situation. The husband or wife is married, but hasn’t seen their spouse for years, and without getting divorced the two are already with a different family. 

The other investigator we have is Ronald who comes from a similar situation, His grandparents are active members, his mom is less active and his dad works until 10 every night of the week. We are activating his mom and workings on plans to help her get married to her husband, as a door to start teaching him on Sunday afternoons. Ronald is the one that came up to me in the church last week.

The last one we met last week, her name is Susana and she´s the second councilor´s daughter-in-law. We had an absolutely amazing lesson with her on Monday night. She´s already come to church twice, but we couldn´t ever find a way to meet with her during the week. Finally on Monday night we were there talking with her about Tacna, where she´s from. It’s a lot quieter, safer than Lima she says, and the people are different. We talked to her about the family, how important it is a good environment to raise your family. I told her about the Tri Cities and how lot of dad´s generation came back to raise their families. Then we talked about how in both Lima, and the Tri-Cities, and in Tacna, the church exists, which gives us eternal principals and a strong foundation on which to build our families (Helaman 5:12). We invited her to be baptized on the 22nd, the tarde blanca, (White Afternoon) and she said yes through tears. She knows it’s true, she feels different in the church. Normally we wouldn’t have challenged her for a date so soon, but she goes back to Tacna for  a long term work trip at the end of the month, and so the schedule got moved up quite a bit. She is full of faith, and ready to make this decision that her husband has been nudging her about for years.

I think our total comes to 7 families that we are baptizing and when we count families that’s also completing families (baptizing one of the parents and the kids that are of age).

I have to finish this letter, but I have more things to share, miracles abound and the insights that I gain from the people that I interviewed this week were golden. Scanty on the details, but I interviewed a man who will be getting baptized on Saturday, he said that he and his wife have always been pretty good, problems happen but they don´t get derailed from being okay in the family situation. The night before the elders arrived at their house he and his wife were talking about their future, he asked her if she wanted to be happy with him forever, and she said yes, as well as did he. They agreed that night to start working seriously on fixing a few problems they were in. The next day, the elders knocked on their door and from that moment, the brother says he can´t stop thinking about how he had a righteous desire, and God saw that, and sent him the elders to make it a reality. It´s true, when we want to do something righteous, God will give us the way to make it a reality.

I love you all, I think of you often, I have one more year here, and I plan on wearing it all out, completely and wholly.

Love,

Elder Nelson

A Book for Ronald

Getting Wet with Zona Comas!

Dear Family,                                                                                                             

The package must still be coming through or in the offices waiting to be picked up, I received a letter from Sister Grimmett this week, thanks for the animos and also for the great analogy. I was a little weird in the stomach this week but all in all I recovered and now I’m fine, just a little topsy turvy from a beet salad.

Apart from that I wanted to mention a couple cultural things that I never seem to send in my emails that will help you to visualize a little more about what things are like here. There’s little kids that run up to us in the street that say "hellow" but literally like that is spelled haha. They want to practice their English and shake the gringos hand. The shady characters on the corners of the street wave and shout "Elderes!" when we pass and tell everyone else not to mess with us. Other people, it depends on their religious affiliation if they will say hi back to us or not. 

Something that’s going on this month and next month because of summer is Carnavales. It’s basically a free for all water fight that goes on all month long. For example, about every three houses there’s an above ground pool, and usually a bunch of little kids just sitting in it to keep cool. Every 3 pools or so there are groups of teenagers that have water guns and water balloons to throw at people, strangers, other teenagers from the neighborhood, whobeit, they get them wet. A few years back they made it illegal, but the people keep at it. Nobody has tried to get us yet, mostly because the people have a profound respect for "preachers" anybody that has a bible and so they try to teach their kids it’s not okay to splashing us with little buckets of water. It´s actually really funny to watch because the jovenes start to fight with water and then somebody shows up with water with shoe polish in it (black) and then another shows up with paint in a bucket and they just finish like Christian Burrup after more than a few of his dates. It´s even better to watch their moms not let them in the house and tell them to go hose off in the dirt patch in front of their houses :). Good old fashioned fun.

The spiritual experience of the week award goes to Sunday. We are teaching a lot of kids, which while fun and a lot easier, isn’t exactly our goal as a mission, but well they came to church this Sunday and I had promised Ronald that if he came to church I would have his very own Book of Mormon for him. He is the grandson of a super active member who’s about 75 or 80. He’s a carpenter, and he has Peruvian wood that he’s willing to gift to me because grandpa’s a carpenter hobbyist as well.  It’s called caoba, maybe you can check with the internet and see if its something grandpa has worked with, it’s a hardwood from the jungle. Back to Ronald, he came up to me after sacrament meeting, 9 years old, and he taps me on the side...Hermano Nelson, me dijiste que si vine a la iglesia tendría un libro de mormon para mi. SO I smiled huge because he’s 9 years old and wants to read the Book of Mormon, and pulled his Book of Mormon out of my bag to give to him. He hugged the book and ran back to his mom, who is a member who is returning to activity. I love experiences with kids because sometimes they teach us to live the gospel more purely than we have been. When was the last time you hugged the Book of Mormon because you knew it was the word of God, or pulled it out to study it really and truly. I love this book. It´s true, the events and people in it are real and they really saw Jesus Christ when he came to the Americas. Read it every day, and I promise you´ll see more of God´s hand in your life.

I love you all, take care of  each other!

Love,

Elder Nelson

A Call to the RMs to Join in the Work

Dear Familia,                                                                                                                            

(hello from dust and dirt to the sand and the sun )

                                               

Melissa told me to guilt trip every once in a while, so here’s number 1, love ya sis. Go ahead and let it extend to Kolby too. He looks great in the dodge ball uniform, we actually had a tourney here in Peru during the mission Christmas party, so tell him to keep practicing for the international league :)

In answer to the questions, yes you hid that letter in my suitcase, but I already read it once, something like 8 months ago. I´ve resealed it and I think it will probably wait until I get home to be opened again. You mentioned the new new film at the temple...is that different from the new film that I saw a month ago?

They have national sports here but I think all three national teams are based in Lima: (all three are futbol) Alianza Lima, La "U", and Crystal. Then there’s national volleyball. That’s it for sports, soccer and volleyball. They know what basketball is, but they don´t really play it. Oh that’s right winter olympics. I doubt there are any Peruano athletes, there really isn’t the infrastructure or the climate for winter sports here in Lima, or for Peru in general.

As for the civil unrest part, the worst I have heard of was that there was a signboard protest outside of Tottus, a Chilean based superstore in the other part of the stake, but that’s just because there is a gigantic push to buy Peruvian right now. It was completely non violent. Other than that, a good sign for those worried moms out there is that the Peru Lima North mission should end up 40/60 sisters to elders by June or so...that means it´s super safe here, and it means the elders are being sent into the hills at an ever increasing rate. Hooray for a fantastic workout every day. That’s something I´ve actually found to be grateful for, the fact that my area right now is huge and full of hills has put me in the greatest physical shape probably since the BEAST days. I feel good in the mornings when I wake up, and I focus more of my exercise on my abs and arms, because my legs are fine. Just working off the little chub I’ve got going from all the rice and bread :) Also, yes we are still autopensioning, mostly because at this point I know that I eat better when I am providing my own breakfast (mmmm… fiber doesn´t really exist too much in the Peruvian diet, so I eat a lot of fiber cereals) As for dinner, we eat lunch at 1 and they feed me enough to count for lunch and dinner, so I usually just have a supply of juice or flavored waters and crackers, and sometimes I buy bread to go with my jam that I have. It´s almost always something light to keep the energy until the morning.

That (my diet or the chub) is not the reason I had to get my baptismal pants mended. What happened was that I lent my pants to another American elder in my zone because his pants had gotten fungus from the font water, the Saturday before changes in my first zone, 6 months ago, but then I got changed and the elder had sent them to wash, he gave them to the zone leaders to pass along to me, but they got lost somewhere in the exchange. Since them I have been borrowing from other elders, but back in December I went to the temple and bought myself a new pair of white washable baptismal pants...but they come in infinity length so I had to send them with a member to shorten. 

Other general announcement: I took out 100 soles from the bank at a rate of about 2.83 soles to the dollar, just so you know. I used some of it to buy a tie during p-day today and the rest will stay in my wallet as my personal emergency fund. Also, I turned the page on my Calendar and found out that February is the last month that I have...are you planning on sending me another calendar? I´d love to have one, This calendar has been a permanent fixture of my desk space and something that I can look to quickly to figure out baptismal dates and budgeting of the assignment of money I receive from the mission. Basically I´d just like to have a new calendar for this year and I am rambling to give you a few reasons haha

This week we met a few new investigators and kept preparing a few others, but we are noticing a pattern in how the new investigators are. They are almost all children/youth from 9 to 14 years old. We don´t get as many new investigators from strictly contacting because that isn’t the focus of the mission. We still contact, but our main focus is in activating members who haven’t come for a long time, and helping them to complete their families. The problem is that the majority of the less active families we find are all members except for those children that weren’t old enough to be baptized when they were members. It´s interesting to teach kids because they are innocent of a lot of things. They believe right away what you are saying if you can say it in a way that they understand and it´s incredible the effect that a child can have on the rest of his family. If he gets up on Sunday morning and tells his parents he wants to go to church, they first want to know why, and so they come to church as well and start to remember what church was to them, they remember the process of listening to the missionaries when they were little and a lot of the time remember "their" missionaries. 

Joe wrote me this week and mentioned how the mission is a big or small part of every single day of his life since coming home. It ought to be true of every returned missionary. I hope the returned missionaries who read this letter take time this week to contact their converts in some way. Let them know that as they are spiritually begotten of you (Pablo spoke a little bit about that in the opening of several of his epistles) you remember them, you love them, and hope that they remember the covenants you helped them to make. If they haven´t remembered, maybe hastening the work is also a call to pass the references of your converts to the mission where you served, so the full time missionaries can go on a rescue mission, to find this family and bring them back to the fold of God.

I know that this work is His work, He guides it and Hastening the Work of Salvation is His program designed to find the lost sheep and in so doing share this great gospel message. As His representative, I testify that His Son, Jesus Christ, came to the earth on one purpose, to save his brothers and sisters. I love Him, He is my example in all things, and the love I have for Him motivates me to work even hard every time things get me down. Keep the faith, He will strengthen you if you find yourself lacking.

No specific stories this week, but I promise I will write more this next week. I love you all, I hope that you are making correct decisions and trying to mend the incorrect ones. The atonement works, but only when we try. Pray for missionary opportunities, and then act on them with valor when they come to you.

Love,

Elder Nelson 

Missionary Pace

Dear Family,                                                                                                            

What a week! I get to the internet cafe every week amazed that the week has gone by so fast and searching for something extraordinary to share with the family and friends I have. Something that can be hard for a missionary to transmit can be the sheer incredibility of the missionary work. We honestly can´t describe what it’s like unless you have been in the ward as our companion. For example, this week we needed to get the baptismal permission slips for Kevin and Yaquelin so that we could go forward with plans for the baptism. The dad works in the neighborhood where we live, so we planned to go by there first. We passed by and thankfully he was there, we asked if his wife and kids would be coming down from their house to sign the slips and be interviewed for their baptisms and he said...uhhh can we move this to another day (this was Thursday) they are in Independencia (half hour drive) and I have to go get them probably tonight then if they need this interview. So we moved the interview and the permission slips to the day before their baptism, and then when they didn’t call us to set up the interview time in the morning we decided that this required a little more effort on our part. We practically ran up the hill (300 stairs and then a rocky ascent) to get to their house quickly and not lose the zone leaders’ time for the interviews. We got there, sweating hard but ready to help them come down with their kids for the interview. What we found was an angry she dog ready to bite my shoe (she’s the size of chika no worries) for coming too close to her last puppy. We also found the family, but they weren’t ready to come down, and told us they could come down after lunch to the bishop’s house for the interview. ...uhhh yeah okay we can figure out a way to make that work we said and then started the long trek down. We did all of that in the space of about an hour and a half.

 Angie and her Missionaries

Angie, her grandparents and her Uncle Eric

So that was our first exciting experience of the week, the other was the day of the baptisms. Saturday we got up and went to the church after studies and breakfast and started to clean the font and the room where the font is. The morning went by super-fast and we ended up cleaning until lunch at 1, with the baptism at 3, my baptismal pants being mended by a member in the hills to be recollected at 2 and a lesson to teach to the recent convert that was fixing us lunch somewhere in there. Needless to say it was a tight schedule, but we made it to the chapel at 3:05 and by some strange happening the family had come early. This is the family of Angie, who´s pictures are attached. They wanted the baptism  early in the day to keep it private because Angie’s mom is pretty sick (with the hat) and can´t see a lot of people. In attendance were the bishop, the primary president, Angie her grandparents and her uncle, Erik. 

From there, we returned home to hang up the baptismal clothes and set the fan on high so that they would be dry at 8 for the other baptism. We left the house after leaving everything ready and left for the other area (Retablo) so that I could interview their baptismal candidate 1hour antes de su bautismo.. Leaving our area, a lady stopped us in the street saying she was a member from another stake and wanted us to come to her sons house to give him a blessing (her son’s not a member). We called ahead to Retablo saying we would be coming in a touch late, but not to worry and then went to his house. His name is Jose and he has a tumorous growth in his nether regions...suffice it to say that the Peruvian people are really really direct, and I don´t plan on picking that up :) We talked about the priesthood and then gave him the blessing, we will be going back on Wednesday after the surgery.

After that we left our area and got to the other area, gave the interview and left again because we had a dinner appointment that had already started to pass (appointment at 7 and then it was already 7:05) We get to the appointment in our area and start to eat when we get a call from the zone leaders saying that the MJs (single adults)

had an activity and that they needed us to come to the church early before the baptism to help them convince people to stay for the baptism. On full stomachs we ran home and grabbed my baptismal clothing (thankfully dry) and hurried to the capilla. Basically all went well after that and we returned home to absolutely pass out for the night.

We go at that kind of pace for a couple of days and it exhausts us, then we have really slow days, when it seems like all of the appointments we thought we had fall through. All in all it’s an average or accelerated pace, but it’s a total rollercoaster. I love it. It teaches me that this life is up and down all the time and that if we are true disciples of Christ, we can take the super up and downs to make the ride a little smoother for others. Really that’s what I’m coming to learn is the mission work here in Lima Norte. We work super hard and take the good the bad and the ugly in hopes that we calm the waves for the people we find in storm tossed seas. One of my favorite hymns has always been Master the tempest is raging, more for the musical quality than for the lyric, but as I think about this week, I think we can all depend a little more on Him in this crazy crazy life, and in so doing he takes our troubles and tells us to give them up. The chorus in Spanish:

Las olas y vientos oirán to voz:
“¡Cálmense!”
Sean los mares que rujan más, o diablos que bramen con fuerte clamor, las aguas al barco no dañarán del Rey de los cielos y de la mar.
Mas todos ellos se domarán.
“¡Cálmense! ¡Cálmense!”
Mas todos ellos se domarán.
“¡Paz, cálmense!”

Whatever this life throws at you this week, remember this: He is the Master, and this ship will not sink mientras el lo guia. Espero lo mejor por cada uno de ustedes y deseo que dejen sus cargas a Sus pies.  (I hope the best for each one of you and wish you lay your burdens at His feet.)

Love,

Elder Nelson

 

PS. Happy birthday to Kolby and Darci, there are letters on the way but probably won´t get there this week you two are the greatest, stay strong and never look back

Pink Sunrises and White Afternoons

Sunset/Sunrise over Ana Nuevos

Dear Family,                                                                                                   January 20, 2014

This week I wasn´t changed. As well as in my first area, I will be staying in this area 4 changes, the equivalent of almost 6 months. I´ve been able to meditate a lot on what that means, me being somewhat of a long term missionary while others are changed every transfer or every other transfer, and I still haven’t arrived at what it means but I know that it´s not President who makes the changes, it´s Jesus Christ, so there’s obviously something more that is waiting for me this change. (He wrote that none of the 4 Elders in the ward were changed...they have all been there 6 months.)

As for the climate, well, we are in full summer right now, and that means that it’s humid, and hot and really not conducive to the missionary uniform, but "All things I can do in Christ Jesus" right? The first missionaries of the church had to go through a lot more than just heat in order to serve Him, and so it isn´t such a difficulty to serve him as I do here in Perú. This week we had Kevin, a 9 year old we are teaching that has a phobia of water didn’t go through with the baptism. His mom forgot the baptismal date and time because she was finishing the equivalent of elementary school and planning a trip to the beach to celebrate. She was baptized a month or so ago and now we are teaching her kids. The family hasn’t come to church for two weeks due to trips to the beach :/ but her older daughter, Jaclyn (11 anos) chose to have her baptism with her brother this Saturday, the day we had reset his baptism. That’s huge and happened in kind of a funny way. She came in at the end of a lesson about the law of chastity (adapted to a 9 year old) from the neighbor’s house, and her dad is kind of a jokester. He said Jaclyn, your baptism is this Saturday, are you ready? Well this time she didn’t just run out of the room at the thought, so we ran with it, and I said Ya, are you going to be baptized this Saturday, we are going to fill the font halfway for your brother. She gave me a half worried look, so we did a baptismal demonstration with her brother and kept telling her how simple it is, we even have permission from the mission to have her parents stand in the water at the edge of the font, within view the whole time. At the end of it all she said yes! She will have her interview the same day as her brother and we will complete the family this Saturday along with another part family we are finishing.

Ana Nuevos Foursome

Maybe my letters end up being a little shorter than other missionaries because we are given exactly an hour and fifteen minutes to write in this mission, and I strive to give exactly that amount of time, but when the letter to president (15 minutes) takes priority and grows beyond that time because its necessary as part of my duties, I can´t help but shorten this letter to you all, just know that I love you, that these two years are a witness of my dedication to the Lord and through Him to having an eternal family due to His atonement. I love Him, and I love serving Him. His atonement makes it possible to start again every single week, and when we value that gift as we should, we find joy in this life, we find a purpose to get up every morning, we find motivation to sacrifice ourselves as we have promised to do since before this world and look to do His will.

Zona Comas

We are planning an activity in the zone that is starting to focus our efforts in each ward. It’s a White Afternoon, an afternoon at the end of February when we will baptize 45 people as a zone/stake. It will require a great effort seeing as the area in which I am is pretty dry. We are asking a great effort from the members to bring their family members to light and help us to find every person within the ward boundaries that has even the slightest desire to know the love of God better. It may seem a little strange at first, this kind of massive baptism, but when we think about it in terms of a desire to feel the spirit in greater power than we feel in a regular baptism, I feel good about it. It´s not about the number, it’s about creating a modern day waters of Mormon, or giving a modern day invitation to baptism as Pedro (Peter) did in Acts. We want this great quantity of people to be baptized in a quality manner (there’s a great quote from Elder Holland about missionary work and quantity/quality).

I think this is the quote from PMG that he is referring to:

““A convert’s new life is to be built upon faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His redeeming sacrifice—a conviction that He really is the Son of God, that He lives this very moment, that He really is the door of the sheepfold, that He alone holds the key to our salvation and exaltation. That belief is to be followed by true repentance, repentance which shows our desire to be clean and renewed and whole, repentance that allows us to lay claim to the full blessings of the Atonement.

“Then comes baptism for the remission of sins. Yes, baptism is also for membership in the Church, but that isn’t what the Prophet Joseph Smith chose to stress in that article of faith. He stressed that it was baptism for the remission of sins—focusing you and me, the missionary and the investigator again on the Atonement, on salvation, on the gift Christ gives us. This points that new convert toward the blessings of the ‘good news.’” (“Missionary Work and the Atonement,” Ensign, Mar. 2001, 10–11).”

   

For that reason we are looking for this great quantity of people in the first two weeks of the transfer, then during the remaining 4 weeks we are creating a quality conversion by focusing all of our available time teaching them and preparing them for baptism. On the 22nd of February, three days before transfers, we will have a closed circuit camera beaming the baptismal font to the sacrament meeting screen and projector, where the entire stake will be able to watch and feel the power as the Nefites of old felt. We are excited to say the least.

I love you all, I am trying up the quality of the letters at the same time as the quantity of words in each letter. Know that I love you, know that I love this gospel and the atonement, know that Christ lives, and He loves us in a way that we will never fully understand, and for love of His family, He sacrificed His perfect life to save us.

Love,

Elder Nelson

Putting the Gospel to Work

Comas Zone at a permanent style County fair on P-day

Dear Familia,                                                                                                                                    

           

Yes Beatriz got baptized! She asked us Saturday if she could talk to some sister missionaries about a few doubts she had and my mind started to spin. I almost lost a chunk of faith, but we said of course and called the sisters to come up on Sunday to talk to her. After the lesson we didn’t get to talk for a few days and on Tuesday we had an appointment with her and her family. We walked in and in the course of the conversation we asked her if she was ready for her baptism on Saturday and she said yes! When will it be? Wow, she was soo sure, soo excited and it made sense to her about the church, she has a testimony, and when she bore it after the baptism, she said how she was sad her parents couldn’t be there to watch, but she has faith that someday that they will understand that this is the true church like she does. She kept bearing her testimony and suddenly into the chapel walked her mom! Mid-testimony she came in and sat down in silence. We hope to be able to teach her this coming week. She didn’t make it to see her daughter baptized, but she heard half of her testimony and she has seen the positive change that has happened in her daughter’s life.

This week we were able to work on the home teaching program her in the ward and really try to help the elders quorum president understand how it works. He’s a convert of about 2 years and so its new to him and to the majority of the ward. He went out to visit some of the recent convert families with us this week and we showed him how a home teaching visit goes and how to make some kind of a report of what happened. He was really grateful with us and expressed how really even though his family has been going to church for 15 years or so, in his 2 years he hasn’t been able to learn much about how to exercise his priesthood in his home. I ended up giving him my ordinance card in Spanish and there was a talk about FHE this week in the sacrament meeting, so he is coming along. That is one thing we are finding is that many of the members don´t know what a functioning LDS family is, what are the "normal things" we do that all members should be doing.

That lead me to think about what are the things that we as members ought to be doing that maybe we aren’t so focused in doing. We are always striving to make our homes into temples, but what are the things that we should do inside of our homes to make them into temples? Because really what makes a temple a temple isn’t the beautiful paintings nor the whiteness of the walls nor the way we act inside, it’s the sacred covenants and the blessings promised there. In our homes, it’s the FHE, daily prayers and scripture study, in addition to the decoration, the mutual respect we show and the actions of love.

Well, I hope this is a good letter, I hope it’s been food for thought and a letter that isn’t just dead in the blog, but something that provokes action and a real difference in your lives. I love you all, and I want these letters to be like the New Testament, not just words in an old book, but words that work in the hearts of men, to their eternal benefit.

Love,

Elder Nelson

ps  We will find out about transfers after our computer time....

New Year in Lima

Dear Familia,                                                                                                                  

This week was New Years, and a veritable war broke out in Lima, but not really. We went up to the 5th floor of our building and watched some fireworks and I took a pretty good video of 15 minutes straight of gigantic aerials. The smoke lingered for probably a couple of days and fireworks are a year round thing kind of and so the dogs didn’t really freak out too much. We also burned a muñeco which is kind of like a scarecrow/effigy. It’s a tradition here in Peru and represents burning the past and getting ready for the New Year. We named him Elder Shrek and he had a drawn on plaque and everything. After New Year’s was all over, we finally got to work and were able to get the people we are teaching to focus, until then, it was more like, appointments failing and people being generally flaky and not coming to church and not reading because the neighbors were up too late partying.

Now however, Beatriz is getting baptized this weekend and the next weekend we are starting to complete a family, baptizing one of the kids (Kevin 9 years old) of a couple we married and baptized a month or two ago. Beatriz is exciting, still a little bit wishy washy, but she was able to get through her baptismal interview and we are helping to put her doubts to rest. Especially she doubts why the prophet needs two councilors and that the Catholic Church which her father is in won´t help her get to heaven. That’s a hard doctrine, but it’s that they will help her get to heaven, the terrestrial kingdom, and that isn't where the majority of people really want to end up. She wants to have an eternal family, and the only way to do that is to be in the celestial kingdom, and before that obviously be baptized and go to the temple. I love talking about eternal families and the plan of salvation. It´s absolutely the root of everything here, and the most misunderstood that there is here on earth. 

If everyone just understood that God is our loving Heavenly Father and that He sent us here to be tested, that we came here to a have a family and progress spiritually for a period of about 80 years in which we will experience joy that we didn´t know before because we didn’t have bodies. That the death we know isn’t the end and that we are destined to become families for the eternities, there wouldn´t be quite as much sadness in the world. Also, there would be lot more respect for the law of chastity, that’s not something to be played with, seriously. Here, it’s a huge problem, and the people sometimes don´t understand, but almost all of the time they say they know it’s a sin or that they shouldn’t, benefits of that the Catholic Church at least teaches that. If they don’t enforce it, that’s another issue.

This week will be a good week, but at the same time a little up and down, cambios are a coming and I don´t know where I will be after next Monday. I think I am staying another change, but we really never know. Guessing doesn’t help, and so I will try to get my head down and work hard this week to make sure things go well with the baptism and that the area looks good into the future.

I love you all, I hope everyone had a safe and fun new years and that they can put time into dedicating this year to being just a little more diligent, a little more loving, a little more patient and a lot more happy. 

Love 

Elder Nelson