A Baptism Tomorrow!

29 August 2013

Letter to All:

Well everyone is healthy now!  Ready to rumble!  This week was good, but we need new investigators, we are trying to think of new ideas to get good investigators.  I know we´ll be blessed with more.  We do have 1 new family that´s pretty positive, he said he´ll come to church and read to Book of Mormon, they had a lot of good questions.  The other families have kind of disappeared; we never find them anymore so we are going to be doing all we can to find more.  It seems to always happen in the mission, you find a ton but very few make it through.  But it´s worth all the work.

Jissenia is getting baptized tomorrow!  She asked me to baptize her.  She´s inviting her family members to come to her baptism as well.  It´ll be great!  I´m so excited to see a baptism it´s been a while.  She´s going to be an awesome member I know it!  She´ll help the branch a lot.

It´s been kind of hot lately here, I got burned today.  Wednesday there are changes, so we´ll see what happens, who knows.

We had a great experience with a less active this week.  All of our appointments had fallen through, and we went to buy a snack and sit down and eat it.  Then the member’s little boy came up to us and said when are you going to come to my house, we said right now.  We had passed by a lot in the past but she was never there.  We finally were able to talk with here (Heidy).

She told me that her life has been really rough in the past few years being a single mom and fighting to get food on the table.  She was to work in the night time and come home and watch her kid all day and hardly even sleeps at all.  She began to cry telling us some of her trials.

I told her, God is watching her efforts, and that Jesus Christ will be by her side to help her and he knows exactly how she feels.  Then we ended with a prayer, she prayed.  She gave thanks to the Lord that we had come and she really needed someone in that moment, usually she isn´t an open person.  She felt better getting some of these things off her chest and talking about her trials with us. 

It was truly a neat experience led by the Spirit.

Take care!

Elder Willden

                             

 The first picture is a place called Las Lajitas, we work over there a lot, it´s a very poor place. 

 The second picture is of the beautiful hills that are in Santo Tomás.

Good News!

12 August 2013

Letter to all:

Well all this week we had to do divisions still only 2 elders working at a time because of the sick elders, Elder Ajtun got better Friday but Elder Watts got better basically today.  So this week should be good.  

Good news!  Yisenia is going to get baptized!  Next week on a week day, maybe the 20th so we can do it before changes on the 21st because she has to work Saturday.  She finally came back to church and is planning for her baptism!  So that was great news.

Sadly Ronald has disappeared, now 2 weeks without seeing him.  Now we have to find more investigators, contact more, ask more references because a lot are going downhill.  We have a positive family but she doesn´t have her last name nor paperwork that she even exists.  That happens actually a lot here, but we’ll see what we can do to help her.  There´s a member of the church in Managua that helps a ton.  It´s the family I talked about last week, Maykalin and Felix.  He lost his job so we should be able to teach them more now.

Sunday 40 people came to church, that´s not bad.  As a district we brought 6 investigators to church, 3 and 3.  The lord blessed us with those 6 investigators in church because all week we couldn´t visit everyone we needed to.  

It´s raining a lot, yesterday we got completely drenched, some days it actually gets pretty chilly and other days it´s humid.  In the picture it´s a picture of our street, that day everything was foggy.  Santo Tomás is very different from the rest of the places in Nicaragua, weather wise.

Love you all, thank you for all of your support!

Elder Willden

Elder Willden did something new this Week . . .

5 August 2013

Letter to All:

Well this week was a little lame to be honest.  My companion is sick, 2 days we didn´t work.  Another Elder in my district is very sick; we might go to the hospital this week.  So the sicknesses affected things this week.  But we have some new people to work with now.

There´s a family we only taught 1 time, Makalin and Felix.  But I´ll tell you how the Lord has shown us how we really need to teach this family.  One day all of our appointments fell through and I told my companion we are going to go visit a small neighborhood far off and see what´s over there.  We are going to find a chosen family of the Lord over there.  There were only about 10 houses but we went further and we found a young pregnant woman outside of her house and we talked with her and put an appointment to return.  But it´s was hard to find them in the house always.  The other elders contacted them about 2 weeks later and told us, “Hey there´s this family that lives over here that said you guys passed by and they said they are really interested in listening to you”.  But we didn´t find them in the house again and again.  Yesterday the other elders were teaching a family and there they were! It just happens to be that his parents live over there.  So they put an appointment for us to visit this Sunday.  I feel the Lord really wants us to teach this family.  We´ll see how it goes.

Well the 3 people we had fixed for a baptism, aren´t so positive right now, Satan is really working on them.  Ronald can´t come because of work, all week he was gone.  I´m asking the Lord to help me to know what I need to do.  Hopefully we can get them back on the path.

That´s all (folks!)

Elder Willden

P.S. l

Oh! and I gave a baby blessing this week!  I was surprised that they asked me to do it!  President Russell came to the branch that day too with the Councilors of the mission and they all gave testimonies.  Sister Russell can´t speak Spanish well but the Spirit was so strong when she bore her testimony.

If you are curious here is a link about Elder Willden's new mission president:  http://www.lds.org/church/news/first-presidency-calls-new-mission-presidents-gallery?lang=eng#russell

29 July 2013

This week was good, not the best neither the worst.

Letter to All:

Well we talked with Ronald, sadly he couldn´t come to church but he’s excited to be baptized on the 10th.  We found a new investigator, Serbulo. The missionaries have visited him before and we passed by once but he wasn´t very receptive.  The other day we passed by and the Lord had softened his heart and he was receptive.  He put his own baptismal  date for August 31st. 

We also spoke with both Rojer and Jisenia and I read Alma 34 with them and I was honest with them and I told them they were prolonging the day to their repentance.  They put their own baptismal date for August 24th, so this month we should have at least 3 baptisms.  That is what we´ve been trying to do lately, having the people choose their own baptismal date if they desire, so it´s more personalized, hopefully It´ll work.

It´s still raining a lot here, lots of mud as you can see in the picture.

Oh I almost forgot.  Yesterday the branch president didn´t show up, I called the Zone Leaders and they called the mission president and he said that I was to conduct the sacrament meeting.  So that was new, I got to conduct sacrament meeting -- Branch President Willden for an hour haha.  The branch president showed up 35 minutes late to church. Luckily we had 3 investigators come to church!

It´ll be a great month!

Take care!

Elder Willden