17 June 2013

Letter to All:

We made pancakes the other day for breakfast; it was nice to have some good old pancakes for a change.  

This is the Catholic Church in Juigalpa, there a lot of Catholics,, especially in my area almost everyone is a ¨Catholic¨.  

So this week we found a couple new families, now we have 3 families with baptismal dates, hopefully we can find a few more.  Things are starting to move along now, more lessons, we know more members.  Sadly no one came to church again.  So this week our district is going to focus all week on getting people to church, preparing people today so they can come Sunday. We have to find a way around the wall of the challenge it is to get people to church, but I feel that this week we´ll get some in church.  We´ll be teaching the importance of receiving revelation in church and how they will feel different in the week if they go to church.

                                             

My companion was a little bummed this week because his ex-girlfriend got married the other day to a return missionary.  I told him don´t worry you´ll probably do that to some other missionary after your mission! haha.  But he´s more focused now.  I´m glad I didn´t leave a girlfriend waiting for me!

Well the 25th we have our last meeting with president and the 29th we´ll have the new one. It is sad to say goodbye to President Monestel but I´m excited at the same time so see what the new president has planned.

Have an excellent week!

Elder Willden

10 June 2013

Letter to all:

This past week we have been working a ton.  We have found a lot of new investigators from the few people that have helped us.  So now it’s just a matter of teaching all of these new investigators and seeing which ones progress.

We contacted one family and we came back and taught them and they were super positive.  Their names are Pedro and Blanca.  They understood well, and had good questions.  We didn´t have enough time to finish the lesson on the restoration and talk about the book of Mormon.  They said, hey why aren´t we going to talk about the Book of Mormon.  So we left a Book of Mormon and said next time we´ll talk about it.

Then we set an appointment to return and Pedro said, “But what am I supposed to do if I can´t be there for the lesson? Can I have your phone number or something?”  It got me really excited to see how they truly desire us to come and visit them; they had thirst for this restored gospel.

Our numbers as a district are going up a lot; we are doing a lot of great work. I come home super tired every day but I feel good having a day full of work, serving the Lord.  What I don´t like about being a district leader is reporting and taking numbers every night, but oh well.

Sadly in our area no one came to church.  They tend not to go to meetings if it rains, I´m pretty sure they are afraid of the rain, Nicaraguans.  The attendance at church was 29 and that’s with the 4 missionaries and 3 from the district presidency.  It´s pretty small, but we´ll get things growing.

Today we visited a place nearby called la poza azul.  There´s a picture of the church.

Bye!

Elder Willden

Poza Azul : This is a "lake" of very clear blue water, from which a small river flows - That's what Wikipedia tells us.

The Church Building in  Santo Tomas. 

4 June 2013

4 June 2013

Letter to all:

Well this week a lot happened.

I got changed to a different area called Santo Tomás 2. 

My companion´s name is Elder Ajtun, he has almost 6 months in the mission.   Wow I feel old (missionary-wise) now having more than a year completed - the whole mission is young now.  We are reopening the area in SantoTomas 2. That means they took out the last 2 Elders in this area.  There´s a branch here of about 30 active members, so there´s a lot of work to do.  Oh and I´m the District Leader, there is four in the district.  Elder Wattz and Elder Montes are the others.

The area book only had like 6 or 7 investigators and only a few of them are positive, on top of that we are lost here.  The family that makes us lunch has helped us a lot though; they have been showing us around and gave us about 10 references.  So there´s a lot of work to do here, we´ve been contacting a lot and looking for new investigators.  It´ll be a couple of rough weeks at first but I have a good feeling about this area, we are going to accomplish a lot!

Yesterday we had the activity of the whole mission, it was fun to see all of the mission friends there and there were some funny presentations that they did.  The activity ended at 4:30 we got back to Juigalpa, at 9 pm. This morning we traveled another hour to get to Santo Tomas.

I talked to my old companion and he showed me the pictures of the baptism of William and Marissela!  They got baptized woooh!  Too bad I couldn´t be there to see the baptism.  But I did see the member who baptized them yesterday in a restaurant.

Love, Elder Willden