Monday, July 5, 2010

ONLY ONE MORE YEAR!!! WOW, TIME FLIES!!!

Hola!
How was the 4th of July??? Did you all celebrate? I hope so, I missed it last year, and when you aren’t in the States its just not the same! I hope you all had a BBQ and some fire works! Can I just tell you that it is so amazing here? We are having so much success in our area that we don’t even have time to teach everyone! At church we had 11 investigators! Before that the highest number I had had was 6…almost double! And we are receiving so much help from the ward and especially our bishop because they can see the hard work that we are doing! He bore his testimony all about how grateful he is for the missionaries in the ward and that the members should all open their doors to us and do whatever they can to help us. It was really touching and special! And especially because we had a baptism too! I want to tell you about 2 investigators…The first is the one that was baptized on Sunday, Federico! He is just hilarious! We are so happy for him because the ward just welcomed him with open arms and the Bishop made him feel really special! He was and is so accepting of EVERYTHING about the church and the gospel. Did I tell you that he thinks that all the rain that we have been having is a sign from God that he needed to be baptized! We had such a good time teaching him and we always had a lot of good laughs because he has a great sense of humor. Something I will never forget…. He walks into church on Sunday and asks us, “where is the storehouse?” we were like, “huh?” “in the bible it says to bring all the tithes to the storehouse, I have my tithing so where is the storehouse? Is it here?” haha it was hilarious, so we just had to explain to him about how to pay tithing! He loves everything and I know that he will always be a strong, active member! His baptism was really special and the spirit was really strong! I also want to tell you about Ulda and her partner, Domingo. They are just amazing. I met them my first week in the mission field when I was with Hermana White. And there were rats and everything in their little shack of a house behind an abandoned building. Well back then we didn’t think that there was much potential with them but now there is! Ulda wants to be baptized so bad, but they need to be married first, and Domingo didn’t want to be (I think its because he cant pay for the marriage) so we started to teach him all of the lessons and he was crying in the Plan of Salvation and everything and he has come to church 2 times now and they are just so special! Seriously, Ulda is one of the biggest examples here, she never used to come to church because that was the day that she would do laundry, everything by hand for about 10 people. And it takes her all day… Well she changed and does it all on Saturday so that she can come to church on Sunday. She is so faithful and diligent. Well Hermana Antivilo wrote her boyfriend about Ulda and he was really touched by her obedience to keeping the Sabbath day holy…so he asked everyone in his office if they would chip in a bit of money, and they all did, now we have enough money to buy her a washing machine and we will probably have a little bit left over to help pay for their marriage! The Lord works in mysterious ways, but it was seriously an answer to her prayers because she was so, so sore when she came to church and she said her hands just hurt for days, she is just amazing and when we told her she just cried and said that God had answered her prayers. There are so many other things I could tell you but I just don’t have the time. Just know that we are teaching a lot of Golden families and that the Gospel really does bless families and I love this work, I am so grateful to be a park of this Marvelous work and wonder!
Love you all,
Hermana Reay

1 comment:

  1. Hola Dena,
    No se si te acuerdes de mi, soy Kelinda, la esposa de Raul. Tus padres fueron al Golden Corral el otro dia y los conoci y me dieron la direccion de tu blog, asi que estoy disfrutando leer de todas tus aventuras en la republica. Me parece que las cosas esten muy bien alli y eres una misionera exelente! Seguiremos de cerca el progreso. Hasta pronto!

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