Divisions and Zone Conference!

September 8, 2010

Divisions and Zone Conference!

We had another great week here! As we keep working, we keep finding investigators! Weird, huh?

This week we found Graciela. Her son has prostate cancer and she wants to know why. A lot of people have that question. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" Fortunately, we have the answer if they really want it. (A lot of people don´t really want to understand why.) But Graciela did. I told her about how Mom had cancer and right after Baba did, and how now Mom thinks that she got cancer to help Baba. (You said that once, right? haha, maybe I lied. But I´m pretty sure you said that.) We taught her the Plan of Salvation, but only until we talked about baptism... then she cut us off to ask if she could come to church and get baptized. We told her, "NO!" Ok just kidding, we told her "Sure, I guess, if you really want to." Except she´s going to Buenos Aires for a while to be with her son during his treatments and everything... so we´ll have to wait for her to get back. The Lord really is preparing people for us out there!

Now the news you´ve all been waiting for... divisions! Sorry, Hna. Seegmiller and I didn´t embarrass ourselves. We had a GREAT day together and we got to talk about everything we´ve done in the past 4 months. She´s just so much fun to be with and we work and teach really well together! And we understood everything the people said to us! So it was cool to see that we actually have learned some Spanish here. And we contacted some crazy people... like the lady who told us that we don´t have faith if we haven´t seen the Lord give someone a new heart (like... a literal heart transplant) and the old guy who wanted to marry us because of our blue eyes (we told him no). But it was a great day, and I hope we get to do it again some day. We probably will.

And we also had Zone Conference with Elder Aidukaitis (one of the 70). It was AMAZING. He talked about having good goals, increasing our faith, elevating our hope, and being more diligent. And he has a cool accent (he´s Brazilian, but he speaks a lot of Spanish and even more English). I can´t even explain all the things he taught, it was so powerful and I left really WANTING to do EVERYTHING better. Every once in a while he would come up with an "excuse" to not have baptisms like, "Yeah, we can´t have a baptism this week because our investigator hasn´t gone to church" and then finish with something like, "Because that´s too hard for God, he can´t get people to go to church." Maybe it´s not as funny when I write it, I´ll just say you lose a lot in the translation and blame it on my poor English. But it was funny. And it´s true, we need to have more faith and God will give us the people who are ready or help the people who we´re already teaching. He also told us to think about how our goals would be if we were working one day with the Savior. And we realized that we can improve our goals, haha. It was such a great conference.

I´m glad to hear that everything is going well at home. Tell Aubrey to study hard and not go too crazy at those BUY-I parties. And tell Shawn to enjoy married life. And enjoy your winter while I suffer through an Argentine summer. I heard that Bahía Blanca sits in the bottom of a hole, so the heat just kind of sinks in and the wind won´t even help us in the summer. I´m really excited. (Not really.)

I love you all and I can´t wait to hear from you!

Love,
Hna. LaPray