FASTING REALLY DOES WORK MY FRIENDS

Hola hola!!

It sounds like things are going good down in California. Here things are going pretty good as well; it was a good week. Things could have been better but so far we are progressing along here little by little. We once again spent a lot of time this last week knocking doors and going to visit the innactive and less active members. With the innactive members we haven't had much progress getting a hold of them or getting them excited to go back to church but we still aren't going to give up going through the member list because this branch needs a lot of strengthening and has a TON of innactive members that need fellow shipping. While doing divisions with Elder Hillman we actually found this one innactive member with quite a history. He was the branch mission leader, branch president for years, district secretary (a district is the equivalant of a stake), in the district presidency and now after decades of devoted church service he and his wife are innactive. Why? according to him pure laziness. He thinks that because he worked for so long in the church he's now ok to just chill back in his house and spend the rest of his days in oblivion without going to church. He thinks that he's earned a well deserved rest. When we tried to explain to him that he still needs to keep coming to church to take the sacrament and renew his covenants he told us that he could bless the bread and water in his own home and take the sacrament every week. When we tried to explain to him how that doesn't fly he was stubborn and wouldn't have any of it. But at the end of the visit we did soften him up a little bit so we will see how it goes. We're not going to give up on him just yet. It just makes me sad to see members who were so strong just fall away and lose their faith. It just really shows how we always have to be on guard and never stop working to maintain our faith and keep our change of heart, because the minute we let our guard down and get lazy is when the adversary will strike.

As far as investigators go, we did a lot of door knocking and actually had reasonable success. Fasting really does work my friends. Every time I do one my testimony grows of it as a spiritual and missionary tool and sanctifier. Anyways, doing contacts we found a whole family who was investigating the church before but when the husband got really sick they couldn't keep going to church and then they moved and lost contact with the missionaries and the church. They unfortunately weren't able to come to church this Sunday but they are excited for us to start visiting them again and to start going to church again because I guess they had a really good experience with the last missionaries who were teaching them. So we are pretty excited about that find and are praying hard that the Lord helps them to develop their faith and feel the spirit bear witness to them of the truthfulness of our message. The journey begins again =). Victor is doing well too but it's going to take a little longer than I thought with him because he is full of crazy ideas and it's hard to teach him sometimes. But he understands the importance of having a living prophet and he understands the importance of baptism so we are going to work with that. He actually wants to get baptized right away but we told him that he had to quit drinking first and we taught him the word of wisdom. This week again he came to church (although we did have to go get him) and he said that he would quit drinking so we are going to do everything we can to help him follow through and prepare for baptism during this coming week.

Also this week we were let into houses a lot more and we had a lot more teaching appointments where we were actually able to teach and although all of them aren't going to continue, it just felt awesome teaching so frequently again. I love doing it and it's my job so that definitely helped my spirits last week. Unfortunately Sunday was slightly frustrating because Victor was the only one of our investigators who came to church but we should have a lot more who come next week. Well I don't have too much more time today but I just want to let you know that we're working hard and even though everything isn't going perfectly, we are happy. Happy and ready to get in the water! It's time to end the drought! Ok well I got to go now but take care everybody! Read your scriptures and try extra hard to look for the influence of the holy spirit in life. He's with us a lot more than we think, we are just too distracted and dense to notice it sometimes. Oh and enjoy your halloween! It exists here but as I learned last year it's nothing compared to the states. Bueno les quiero mucho, cuidense y CHAU!!!

su chileno preferido, Élder Harper =)