Monday, March 9, 2015

Rain, falling baptisms, and Happy Birthday Dad!




Familia y amigos,

How is everyone doing? I hope all is well back home.  Well not much really happened this week.  It was just a week full of finding new people, working with the people that we have, and getting soaked.

It has been raining a lot here recently and since we are on the coast random storms just kind of show up and it pours.  Supposedly in the rainy season it is like this everyday all day for a couple months, so we will see if I am here for that time!  Before the mission I hated the rain and getting wet, but now it’s just a part of life.

We’ve been working with a couple of our investigators and should have a baptism this week.  We had a super cool investigator who was the mom of a returned missionary.  We had a couple of really spiritual lessons with her, but we had to drop her because she isn’t progressing a ton.  She was like our best investigator so we were kind of sad to let her go but we prayed and felt like we had to do it.  We just didn’t want her to become an eternal investigator.  Her time just isn’t now.  We really gained her confidence so when the time is right the next missionaries can come in and finish things off.

I wanted tell you a little bit about her and share and experience that we had with her this week.  Her daughter is the returned missionary who served in Honduras and of course she wanted her mom to get baptized right when she got back.  Her mom is a little hard but we saw some potential so we decided to teach her.  We were teaching the restoration with her, just about the great apostasy and then the restoration.  As I was reciting the first vision, the spirit was super strong, and I finished it, and had the feeling to just be quiet.  The room was silent and the spirit just hit all of us, like a brick wall out of nowhere.  It was quiet for like 30 seconds and the spirit just testified of the truthfulness of our message.  I know that Joseph Smith was and is a prophet of God and that he restored this church here on the earth. 

We found another family of 4 who we are working with and they all went to church yesterday.  We just showed up and they were all there ready to go.  They have a fecha (baptismal date) for the 4th of April, so we are working hard for that.

On Saturday our baptism fell through, both of them actually.  One of the investigators wasn’t really ready, and although we easily could have gotten her to do it, we didn’t want to force her because the sins of her not going to church after would just fall on our heads.  She should be getting baptized here soon.  The other possibility just kind of disappeared.  She supposedly went to a finca (country vacation house) (everyone and their dogs here have fincas and just disappear) but she answered her phone and was hiding from us.  We went on a wild goose chase all over Bluefields looking for her, but we couldn’t find her.  We'll see what ends up happening with her, and if she actually wants to get baptized.

The Lord blessed us on Sunday with 12 investigators in church and we have 14 progressing right now.  I don’t know if all of them will get baptized, but that is the plan, and I have faith that they all can get baptized.

I wanted to send a shout out to my dad this week, his birthday is on Thursday.  I hope all of you wish him a happy birthday and I hope he has a great day!  Love you lots dad! Happy Birthday to Nathan, too!

This week will just be another week of finding and retaining our investigator pool, I’ll let you all know what happens!

Have a great week and I love you all!

Love,
Elder Hanson


The photos here are from a lunch we had at a member’s house.  He cooked us this dish here called rondon.  To make it they squeeze out the cream from the coconut meat and turn it into a broth.  Then they throw in meat, usually seafood, and then serve it up with a bowl of rice.  We had some super delicious lobster and crab, and it was super good!




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