Elder Cook Week Fifty

Hey Familia!

We had an amazing experience with Hermana E.  She has been investigating the church for 12 years! With continuous missionaries teaching her! She goes to church every Sunday. The majority of her family are members, and the rest that aren’t are just waiting for her to be baptized first.  She named her son Elder! He went on a mission and now works in the temple and has been helping us a ton in the lessons with her.  Wednesday we challenged her to pray about two fetchas (baptism dates) we left with her.  We left her with our testimonies.  Her son Elder was super sad that she still won’t accept it because he wants more than anything just to be sealed with his mom in the temple so we’re going to keep working with her to see what happens.

On Monday with the familia A. we made cookies!!! You read that right.  We are in Honduras and we made cookies.  And they tasted good!  They’d never had cookies (real cookies, not the kind from the little packages like Chokis because those don’t count) before so they were pretty doubtful of our abilities but they loved them in the end!  They told us that the next day that they wanted us to make them more. I think we have just started a cookie revolution in Honduras. Love you guys!  Say your prayers, study scriptures every day, and think about the real importance Christ has in your life.

Elder Cook

 

Zone Conference

Elder Cook Week Forty-Nine

Hey Family!

We had an awesome week!  We have a fecha [baptism date]! He’s this 18 year old kid that we’ve been working with. The missionaries have been teaching him for a year.   He accompanies us to lessons and always wants us to come over to teach him. After church he said that today was only the beginning because he wants to learn everything about the church!  He has his fecha for the 1^st of March. It’s the surest fecha I’ve had on my mission. We finished off this week with 21 lessons!!  I’ve been trying to break 20 my whole mission. That was exciting. Elder Hafen and I work super well together and  I’ve loved every second of this new area.

This Thursday we’re going to the temple with an amazing family we found my first day in this area. I’ll tell you more about them when I get home because it’s hard to explain but we were sure for the first week that they were actually members. We first contacted the door and a guy comes out yelling, “Heeey, Elders!” We looked at each other thinking that we had just found another member. We went in and he was super nice!  The members usually just call us hermanos, not Elders. We taught part of lesson one, but we just thought he was not attending church because my comp didn’t recognize him. He said he’d been to church a ton in the past, and said that he was a member. It was one big mystery to us. We figured he was just going to the Testigo’s church and mistook us for them, because my comp had never seen this family before and the man said said he had friends in the ward. But en fin [in the end], they are not members of the church, yet. They have a car to help them get to church and they’re married. We almost cried when we found that out. People aren’t usually married here, pretty much ever. So we planned an activity with them to visit the temple and President Fortuna is going to come and talk to them about becoming baptized members of the church!

Love you!

Elder Cook

Elder Cook Week Forty-Eight

Hey favorite family!

Elder Cook and Elder Flores

Heavenly Father knows me.  I was sent to the far away land of Torocagua, about a mile up from Bulevar.  In the changes meeting I watched the pueblo areas go by with names and pictures of Elders who weren´t me and I was pretty disappointed to see that I was still in the city.  But then I got here and I have a testimony that Heavenly Father knows us maybe even better than we know ourselves and always has the best in mind for us.  WE PLAY BASKETBALL EVERY DAY!!!!  My new comp loves sports too and we have the keys to the gym so we go down to play every morning for our exercise time!!!  And we also have running water almost all day, a lady that washes our clothes, and members feed us most of the week!!  I am so blessed.  I feel like it´s more of a vacation out here than a mission.  I´m still district leader and now there´s only one other companionship in my district, and they´re cool guys too.  

My companion’s is from Utah and a really good guy with an awesome testimony and we were great friends from the start. I´m so excited to be here!  We have a lot of investigators that are right on the edge to be baptized. Our ward is small, about 80 people, but the members love giving references.  A guy came to our door this morning and told us about a guy he wants us to teach!  That was sweet.  That´s really cool that you went out with the missionaries Mom!  I bet you were really good with the investigators.  I´d love to have a member to take out like you.  Dad can you play ball yet?  Man I can´t even touch the rim anymore.  When we played ball the first time when I got to Honduras, I could dunk!  It´s pretty sad. But I´ve been getting my touch back so you better get some game on.  

Keep reading your scriptures and praying!

Elder Cook

This is my son, my grandson, and my great grandson

Elder Cook, Elder Angulo, Elder Flores, and Elder Tupou

Transfers

Elder Cook Week Forty-Seven

Hey family

We had a BAPTISM!!!!  We´ve been working hard with this family for the past few months to try to reactivate them, and their daughter got baptized last night!!  Man I love that family.  When they first joined the church a few years ago, the Dad had been second counselor in the bishopric, the mom was a mini missionary and had a calling in the primary presidency.  But they’ve been inactivate for a year or two.  So we´ve been visiting them a ton.  They had the desire to return and baptize their daughter.  After a couple months of working with them, they told us in a visit that they met with the bishop and set a date to be sealed in the temple as a family.  That was probably one of the happiest days of my mission.  We had a date for the daughter to be baptized about 3 times and crazy things kept happening!  Satan did not want that kid in the water.  But we got her there and the service was amazing.  The mom, bore her testimony at the end.  She said how grateful she was for everyone´s help and that this baptism was one step closer to them getting to the temple.  The daughter cried and bore her testimony too, the simplest and sweetest testimony I´ve ever heard.  I asked her how she felt afterwards, and she looked at me with tears and said ¨Feliz¨ [happy].  Then Sunday the grandparents came and her grandpa confirmed her (that tall guy that I sent you a picture of at Christmas).  They work in the temple and he had been a bishop for 11 years!  That big bear of a guy broke down up there.

  

Some people say that miracles don´t happen anymore, that those things only happened in Biblical times.  I am blessed to be able to see miracles happen almost daily.  That family coming back to the church can´t be described as anything less than a miracle.  God exists.  He loves us.  And His works haven´t ended.

Love you

Elder Cook

Elder Cook answered a few questions we’ve been asking:

Yeah that darn goat follows me around!  It even charged me yesterday!  I´m pretty sure it smells fear. The work is good, transfers are Wednesday, I´m good, my shoes are good, yes there are doctors, and no I haven´t found a basketball pump. Those tuna packets you sent were amazing!!