I Gave A Book Of Mormon To Inigo Montoya!

This week- especially the weekend-  was kinda wild.

I want to skip ahead to Saturday night. While we were inviting our people to church, I got a message from one of her friends saying that her work schedule had changed and that she wouldn't be coming to church anymore, and thanked us for all the time we'd spent together as a way of kinda ending things. Later that night I asked a different guy to be honest and tell us if he was still interested, and he said no. To round it off, I made the decision to stop trying to teach one of our friends who was making more time for her kid's Catholic seminary than us. I was kinda bummed since two of them were decent at attending church, which is a HUGE sign of progress. We didn't have nearly anyone left to invite, so that was the end of church invites.

Wr got to church, and things started picking up quick. I got to give a talk on the Atonement, which was fun, and then later we had two pretty cool interactions:

Karen was invited to church by a member last week but was too busy to meet with us during the week. But this week she flagged us down in between meetings and mentioned that she really wanted to learn more!

Later after elders quorum, we got to talk to Kevin, who's been dating a member and coming to church for a bit now. He isn't the first boyfriend I've been asked to baptize, and it doesn't work to get in their face about it. But this week both he and the family seemed to decide it was time for the missionaries to get involved. So we got to talk for a bit. He's a big Paraguayan guy and plays American football. We're going to meet this week and talk about recognizing and inviting the Holy Ghost.

God isn't a business and his plan isn't a vending machine, but it's hard to shake the feeling that these highs and lows are connected. There can be no quid-pro-quo transactions in a relationship with our Father in Heaven, (Alma 22:14 teaches that "...since man had fallen he could not merit anything of himself; but the sufferings and death of Christ atone for their sins") but God will always make it possible for us to move forward. These two new opportunities we got at church will let Elder Allen and I keep sharing the message of Christ with anyone who will listen.

And that wasn't our only success this week. We had a ton of opportunities to talk specifically about the Book of Mormon this week!

-As I wrote last week's email I was sitting in one of our friends' barber chair getting a haircut, and a little bit later we got to talk about what we do as missionaries, and our belief in this other testament of Jesus Christ. Haircut wasn't bad either.

-Another one of our friends let us meet outside on a bench, and we talked about ways to invite the Spirit into our lives. She showed us the Bible she got from a a JW friend of hers, and we gave her the Book of Mormon. She likes how big the font size is. I might try to trade her for that New World Translation this week, since the Reina-Valeras (like the Spanish King James) we give out are also written in bigger font. We talked about the way that the Book of Mormon's witness of Christ invites the Spirit because He testifies of the Savior whenever the truth is spoken about Him.

Street contacting has never been easy for me, but it's much better when you get to talk about the BoM, like we did this week:

-Elder Allen went up to a Spanish guy this week to ask where he was from, and the guy skipped ahead and said he wasn't interested in any kind of message. (They always love to skip the part where we talk nicely and become friends) We pushed through though, and found out that he was visiting from Vitoria and a practicing Catholic. Turns out he'd seen ads for the Church before and actually had some questions about alcohol, leadership, and the name of the Church. We got to talking about the Book of Mormon and he said it seemed interesting and he'd think about buying one! Luckily for him I had a give-away copy. After all of that, we asked him for his name - "Inigo",  and I started to tell him the only way an American would ever have heard of it. He chimed in with the entire Inigo Montoya speech from Princess Bride (in really good English) and showed us his full name on his driver's license. Lucky for me, I don't have six fingers on my left hand. That's definitely a Spain bucket list item checked off.

-A guy noticed our tags in a snack shop and wanted to know if we were both named Elder. That got us talking about missionaries, that got him to call us Mormons, and that let us pull out the Book! Our new friend Adan is a question-asking, book-reading kind of guy so he's excited to read more and talk with usblater this week!

Okay this is already crazy long but one more BoM experience:

-We taught a single mom and her two sons about Helaman's two thousand (and sixty) stripling warriors. It's hard to overstate the powerful lesson that it drives home- mothers who trust in Jesus Christ and teach their children to do the same are a mighty force for good in this world! Carmen and her sons are very busy and it's hard to help them take steps in their discipleship but we gave them an invitation that anyone can do- read one verse every time they eat dinner together, and send a picture to the missionaries. Hopefully that can be a process that they don't stop until we make a group of Nephite warriors out of the three of them.

Go read the Book of Mormon this week, you won't regret it. Its hard enough when strangers don't do it, you guys are too cool for that.

-Elder Curtis 

Service at the new Coello family property 

English class

9 year old's rendering of English Professor Curtis

Peruvian food 

Quad lunch

Morning power outage pic

Honest reaction