Hello everyone!
How are you all? I love you!
The work:
Alex Ortiz was baptized yesterday! That was a HUGE relief for us. He has definitely tried our patience and many other missionaries too. His older brother came to the baptism and has shown some potential for starting to prepare for baptism. He has not shown any interest in learning in the past so we are excited about that!
I don't know how much I told you about Sergio's mom, Elisleidi Avila, but she came to church yesterday! She is progressing amazingly. We had some speed bumps with her in the beginning being to stressed and busy as a single mom for us to teach her too much but we had a couple amazing lessons (just understanding her was a miracle in of itself because she is from Cuba and speaks extremely fast) the past week. She also told us that she has a drug problem, but didn't give us anything besides that, but she talked with the bishop yesterday about it. She also smokes cigarettes a lot. Right after Sergio's baptism we asked her if she wanted to learn about what Sergio learned. To be honest we didn't have too much faith because she hadn't shown any interest previous to his baptism and we had been told by Sergio that she practiced a spirit worshipping religion from Africa. To our astonishment she was very excited to learn, wanted to come to church and even said she wanted to be baptized and asked us what she needed to do that. Her baptismal date is for Oct 10. Since then she had a slow start with appointments and being busy but now she is keeping her commitments and understanding everything well. We are excited to complete Sergio's family! His sister (7yrs old) is also coming to church and loves it!
We are going to the visitor's center with her family, their neighbors- the less active Archundias family who haven't recently slipped back into not coming to church because they are too busy with their friends...., and their felowshipping family in the ward.
Aside from that we are working activating/completing the part member Ferman family. Cesar came to all three hours of church yesterday and we are hoping that his siblings will follow his example.
My thoughts/goals:
I am over my year mark and I think I am starting to realize what people were talking about when they said it was hard to endure to the end. I know that I have learned a lot and become a better missionary. I am still a junior companion and I feel like at this point I'm just learning humility and patience because I feel like I have passed the stage of learning by being trained- officially, I know we should always be learning- so I feel like I now need to learn through having more responsibility etc placed on me, but we will see what the Lord has in store. I do know this has something to do with me learning to not worry so much about what others think about me- just about what God thinks about me. I am learning to ask God what He wants me to become instead of just asking for help with MY goals and ideas.
As for our companionship- it is going quite well. We both learn from each other a lot and we work well together. We both like to talk and debate so as a result we are trying to not get into silly arguments/debates that we seem to have once a week. They don't get in between us because we like debating but still we both feel badly because it makes us loose our focus and sometimes the spirit.
I am also trying to debate/argue less on a personal level, which has been a goal of mine for a long time now on my mission. I just want to not have the attitude that I am trying to prove my point. It is not very charitable- which is another thing I am working hard at recently. I am also trying to apply the scripture in Proverbs 3:5-6 too because I know that I rely too much on the wisdom/learning of men that I was taught at school etc. and not enough prayer/relying on God. This also relates to my goal to not worry so much about what people think about me.
Love!
Elder Myers
