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

Elder Cook Week Fifty-Five

Hey Familia,

Boy we had a rough week! We taught a total of 7 lessons for the entire week! I don’t know if I’ve ever done more walking in my mission. I got sunburned pretty good. If we had a lesson in the afternoon, all the rest of the citas would fall through. If we didn’t have one in the afternoon, sometimes we’d get one that night. We went two days without a single lesson! We even found out today that one of our families we have been teaching moved away. We were going to set a baptismal date with them tonight. Some lady threw water at us today! Kind of a bummer but this week should be great with General Conference coming up! Maybe we can’t get our investigators to progress, but we’re hoping having them hear the prophet speak will change their hearts.

One of my favorite scriptures that I like to share with people is from 2 Nephi 10:23 “Therefore, cheer up your hearts, and remember that ye are free to act for yourselves -- to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life.” If you’re in a hard situation or the things are looking bad, do something about it! We always have the choice to act whether it be for the good or bad, and with every decision we are either becoming closer to God or distancing ourselves from Him. Sometimes we make things more difficult than they are when really we just need to ask, “Do I want everlasting death or eternal life?” And then be glad that we get the chance to choose for ourselves.

Fun Honduras fact: There’s a bird here called the esticidin that swoops down and carries away cats by the tail to go eat them. A member was telling us that she watched her cat be carried away by one.

The church is true!

Love, Elder Cook

Elder Cook Week Fifty-Four

Hey Familia!

We got J to church today! We were thinking it was going to take the Nephite army to get him there, but it turns out two gringos worked just as well. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this guy before. The missionaries have been teaching him and his wife for over a year.  His wife wants to be baptized and goes to church just about every week. She doesn’t want to be baptized until he does. So we are praying and working real hard with him. He went to church once a really long time ago, and someone broke in to his car while he was inside. They took a bunch of stuff, like a radio and money, so he’s never come back. Anyway, we took a member with us two weeks ago to visit him. He was a super kind and patient and J totally listened to him. So he agreed to go to church Sunday! He tried to back out, but we persuaded him and he got there. He snuck out after the first hour but we went and got him again for the third hour. It was so great! His son, the second counselor in the ward was so happy to see him. We had a cita with J today and we’d hoped to put a date with him and his wife, but we’ll see how it goes this week! He’s progressed a ton. We think that it’s his time to follow Christ.

We also found another interesting guy. He’s a good guy so we went in and taught him a little about the Book of Mormon and at the end we asked if there was anything that we would do to help him, like we usually say. He said he used to be a lot more handsome and skinnier, so we were obligated as missionaries to get his life back together so he can find a wife. And he told us he needed a new tie too because he wanted to get into politics, but it had to be a nice tie, nicer than the ones we were wearing.

We met a new family! They were awesome. We were outside teaching them (because it was crazy hot that day inside) by their outhouse, and in the middle of the lesson the 5 year old kid had to go to the bathroom, so his mom went with him. We kept teaching the dad and about five minutes later the kid comes running out of the outhouse completely naked with the mom chasing him trying to clean him up. She catches him right next to us, wipes him, and then drags him back to the outhouse. Took a good ten minutes for the spirit to be felt again because we were all laughing, but it turned out to be a great lesson and we have high hopes for that family!

Read your scriptures. Pray every day. Go to church. That’s how you get to heaven.

Love 

Elder Cook

Elder Cook Week Fifty-Three

Hey Familia!

                Crazy week.  I have a few more good stories to tell you in a year.  L got baptized!! Woo hoo!  Every time we went over to teach her this week we became a little more concerned that she’d actually get baptized this Saturday. She struggled to remember what we taught her.  She had her daughter answer questions we asked during the lessons because she said they were hard to answer. We prayed a lot for her this week to understand what she had been taught.  On Friday when we went to review everything for her baptismal interview questions before the interview for Saturday, she remembered EVERYTHING!  On Saturday we had the interview scheduled at 12 and the baptism at 1pm.  She didn’t show up until 2pm! Everyone was their waiting for her and we had been pretty worried.   But she came, had her interview, and was baptized.  We asked her how she felt after the baptism, and she said “I feel a lot skinnier!”  Close enough, we knew what she meant. We are happy she wanted to follow Christ in her life.

               We also helped someone move the other day!  Moves in Honduras are a whole lot tougher than in the states!  There’s not some nice truck waiting just outside the garage to put stuff in to.  Here, you just have to carry it to the next house if it’s within the same neighborhood.  It’s tricky to dodge cars and people while carrying a fridge and then take it down a couple flights of uneven or missing stairs.  But as we were going with all the stuff we notice two guys run inside, take a bed and run down the stairs!  We stood there thinking for a minute or two, and then realized that these guys were stealing the stuff as we were moving it in!  So we sprinted down to the hermana we were helping and told her what happened. It didn’t upset her too much.  She said just keep going and we’ll see how much stuff they actually take.  We were shocked but did as we were told.  In the end they carried off a couple beds, a fridge, and tv, and maybe a couple other things.  Crazy.

                Yupp, that was our week.  I was super sick Tuesday, at the end of the day I crashed on my bed, so my comp had to make the phone calls.  At some point he came in and put a lizard on me.  I was feeling so crappy I didn’t really notice. I fell asleep and woke up later that night and, let’s just say the lizard was dead.  I felt kinda bad for it.

Love you!

Elder Cook