Elder Cook Week Fifty-Nine

Hey love you I had no time to write today.  Got the little package, loved it! [Elder Cook’s cousins wrote him little notes 12 weeks ago that finally arrived]  I‘ll try to find some time this week to write.  

Love you! 

Elder Cook

Elder Cook Week Fifty-Eight

Hey Famillia

We have 3 baptism dates!!! Wooo Hooo. Such a great start to a letter.  This week was Semana Santa. It’s a huge celebration all week for the death of Christ and His resurrection. It’s bigger than Christmas!  And it’s about the hottest week of every year.  I thought it was a joke that it could get hotter here but I was dead wrong.  It was ridiculously hot. Every day there was something they call “brumo” where the earth gets so hot that the heat rises from the ground and the air is like vapor hazy. It almost looked like the sun was being kind of blocked by the clouds but it was just weird heat stuff.  And EVERYONE was gone to the beach or pueblos from Thursday to Sunday.  On Friday we felt like we were walking through a ghost town from a movie.  There was no one walking the streets, not even any cars!  Pretty crazy. I sweat a lot anyway so you can imagine how much I was sweating this week. The real joke was on us when we didn’t have any water for a couple of days, and we had just drained the pila to clean it so we didn’t shower from Wednesday to Friday. That showed us for trying to clean our house!

Luckily for us practically all of our investigators don’t know how to swim so they were all home this week!  Everyone gets vacation from work for Semana Santa, so we had a ton of lessons!  We put two fechas with a members two kids, ages 11 and 13 for this Saturday. So great. But probably one of the coolest things that’s happened on my mission went down on Sunday. We ran around all morning trying to get people to go to church and went to the capilla empty handed. Even one guy that usually comes with us was gone, which was a serious bummer.  As we walked to church a Hermana stopped us and said that she had given a neighbor a Book of Mormon and that he wanted to go to church.  The hardest challenge with all investigators is getting them to church so we took off running to his house. We found him but he was washing clothes so he said he’d meet us there later.  We walked to the church a little disappointed because here “I’ll meet you there” means “Not a chance on earth I’m going to that church”. We were sitting in priesthood half an hour later, when the hearmans friend walks through the door and sits next to us!  We were shocked! And then a few minutes later, another random old man comes in and he sits down! We tried all week to get people to come to church and didn’t get one. But Heavenly Father got five people there! Two we’ve never seen before and three old investigators. It was awesome! The members neighbor loved every minute of it! He read my Book of Mormon during sacrament and would look up every once in a while when he focused on a verse he liked. He even wanted to take my Book of Mormon home! He had his own from the ward member but tried to take mine. It was so great! So then we had an activity at the temple grounds at 4pm, so we invited him. ALL WEEK we’ve been inviting people, passing by every day to verify that they’d come to this activity, and who was the only person that came? That investigator. He left sacrament meeting only after shaking every person’s hand, all 75 of them. The activity was amazing. It was with the whole mission, minus the pueblos.  It talked about Christ and recently baptized people gave their testimonies. After we walked around the temple and took photos. We sat down to talk with this investigator. He expressed a great desire to follow Christ and wanted to be a member of the church. We told him that his goal was to make it inside those temple doors to draw closer to God. It was an amazing spiritual experience. We put a baptismal date for the 17th of May, right there in front of the temple. Best day ever!

We saw a kids arm get pretty hurt by a big dog. We knocked on a door and stood there waiting for an answer. A little further down the road a kid was yelling right by a fence, a dog had him by the shirt. It took us a second to figure out what was going on, when we finally figured it out, I looked at my companion, looked back at the dog, and realized it had the kid by the shoulder! I took off running, shouting and clapping at the dog. It finally let go. The kid staggered and fell back with a big gaping wound in his shoulder. It was terrible. If we hadn’t taken so long to react we could have helped that kid more. It was a little hard for a while after that.

I’m not going to end on that, we found a new family! A couple, and THEY’RE MARRIED!! That’s as golden as a family gets around here.  We’re excited to have them!

Love you,

Elder Cook

Elder Cook Week Fifty-Seven

Hey Familia,

This week we taught P, that lady we helped get to the hospital, a couple more times. Tuesday we taught her about the Book of Mormon, and she told us she’d already been reading it because a friend gave her one. Then she told us at the end that she would never to go church if we invited her. She said there was no point in going to church and that we should even invite her she’s just get mad. The last Sunday she didn’t go because she was upset that we invited her to go with us. We were a little shocked by her outburst and pretty unsure of what to do with that. We had another cita Friday and we’d been worried every day trying to come up with something we could teach so that she’d have the desire to go to church. We were still undecided that day but went over to her house anyway. After we said the opening prayer we decided to turn to 3 Nephi 11 to help her with her testimony about the Book of Mormon. We didn’t think that would be too much help with the church issue but faith in the Book of Mormon pretty much helps with everything. After we read we asked her what part she liked or grabbed her attention in that chapter. She said we were bad because we made God chastise her about not wanting to go to church! In the first verse it talks about people gathered together to talk about Christ, then that a voice came to them 3 times and they didn’t understand the first two. As we read it she felt like God was specifically getting after her for not wanting to attend church. She continued to talk and teach herself about the Spirit and the importance of going to church for about 20 minutes while my companion and I just sat back and listened. When she finished, Elder Hafen and I looked at each other pretty shocked and kind of just bore our testimonies about the Holy Ghost and personal revelation and closed with a prayer. 

We walked about away thinking that was the best lesson we’d ever had because we didn’t even teach! The spirit said it all. My testimony grew so much in the fact that God’s hand is in this work. He led us to this lady, and He’s not going to let her little uproar about church get in the way of her salvation. As missionaries, we alone can’t do a whole lot to get people to follow Christ and be baptized. We don’t know Spanish well enough and we definitely aren’t very good at convincing. It’s nice to know we have a higher power on our side that is always willing to help us out. We put in our effort to open our mouths and Heavenly Father succors His children unto Him. In the end, Paula didn’t go to church kind of an anti-climactic story. But that was an experience we will never forget.

We also had interchanges this week. I went with our Zone Leader Elder Felix who’s from Brazil. He’s an awesome guy and I learned a lot from him. At every house people tried to guess where he was from. Everyone thought it was Mexico or Guatemala or Panama from his accent. I told him every time that he already sounds like a Latino! At the end of the day he said Brazilians are Latinos. Who knew?

I got my pride knocked pretty good at church. A little girl in a pew in front of me turns and asks me “por que usted es tan chele?” or, Why are you such a white boy? Man. I’ve been getting so tan lately I thought I blended in already. That was a bummer.

Love you

Elder Cook

Elder Cook Week Fifty-Six

 

 
Hey Familia,

Whew! We had a pretty sick week. It started off crazy on Monday! I’ll start with this story. So we were at the church emailing (every other week we write there instead of an internet place). And some guy came to the gate. Our Zone Leader went out to see what he wanted and then he came in and told me I needed to go talk to him. I went out and he asked if I was in the Torocagua area, and I said I was. He said he was a member and he pulled out his temple recommend like an FBI badge to prove he wasn’t lying. He told me about a family that he knew and that the mom was in urgent need of a blessing, like that second. So I ran in grabbed Elder Hafen and some oil, and we headed over with that guy to the family’s house. We went up to where the sick hermana was and found her pouring sweat and screaming from pain in her bed. She was breathing super hard and in between yells and couldn’t focus enough to talk. Her mom was there crying and told us to say the blessing I looked at Elder Hafen as I gave him the oil and we were both pretty worried. I could barely get off the oil cap my hands were shaking so bad. I couldn’t even hear myself say the blessing over the hermana’s screams. When I finished we all just stood around her, like waiting for her to jump out of bed healed or something. Her breathing did slow down a little but she was still in a lot of pain. So Elder Hafen and I sprinted out of her house and went to every member’s house within a mile trying to see if anyone had a car to take her to the hospital. We were pretty convinced that lady was going to die. We found out only about 4 families in the ward have a car and they were all working. After a good hour of running from house to house we finally decided to hunt down a taxi. We grabbed one, got a hermana to look after the lady’s kids and paid for the taxi going and coming. The lady’s sister went with her to the hospital. We went back and couple days later to see if they were home yet, and they invited us right in. They said they wanted to know more about the church. They told us that God sent us to her house and God wanted her to go to our church. We taught them the restoration and about baptism. They told us to come back to teach more. P., the sick hermana told us she used to hate the missionaries and kicked them out of her house. I guess God had other plans for her. It’s pretty amazing to see how Heavenly Father works in people’s lives and we were humbled to get to play such a vital role in not only that lady’s physical well-being, but now as we teach her about Christ’s gospel, and her spiritual well-being as well.

Love you! Conference was sweet huh?  Yeah we saw all of conference because we had investigators at every one!  It was awesome!  Packer´s was my favorite. We had 8 investigators and 2 families come! Each time it was like the speakers were talking to them. God knows exactly what they need.

Love

Elder Cook