I am so happy that everything went really really well for Aunt Becky. i am so proud of her and her decision to get baptized. that is just wonderful. she will recieve so many blessings for this choice. now you two will be huge examples to the rest of the people that you know. but you have to help her mom and help her stay strong in the church. it is a huge change and new members always need a good friend to comfort them in the church and take their hand and walk them along. that is a missionaries dream.
well as for your questions you had, there is still no update about elder oakey. we only know that we are still praying for him and his family and hope for the best for them. i really hope everything goes well and that they can receive the help from god on this one. elder mabey has been out for about 23 months now. haha so yeah he is going home. i am murdering him as the mission language would say. but he is still super pilas and works really hard. we are having a blast out here and he taught me alot. he taught me that when we work hard we have success. even if we dont have that many lessons. as long as we get out of the house everyday on time and honor our schedule, god blesses us and i have really seen that in our work recently. maybe we will not have baptisims but we will at least have the encouragement that we did our best and worked our hardest.
so this week we worked pretty dang hard and it felt really really good. we missed our goal of lessons by one week but we will get that fixed this week and make up for that one we missed. so last monday we had a FHE with this one guy from the family dominguez and we taught them about the atonement. As you know this is absoutely my most favorite subject to talk about. i just love it so much. i have made a lesson plan to teach it so i just love it. it went super well and was pretty spiritual, and then after the dad made us some sandwiches and we ate with him for dinner. his whole family was actually gone on an emergency but we still met with him and he invited us in.
Also we went with this one family from the one lady who´s mother has died, the family of Ana Maria. we are teaching their kids because they are not members, we taught them about the first 3 things in the gospel of Jesus christ which is the faith, repentance, and the baptism. it was a super sweet lesson. they really understood it and we just love teaching them about it because they are super smart in all the stuff we are teaching them, and it is cool to make promises with them and see them receive the blessings because they keep the commitments we make with them.
Also this week we found a new family who is called the family Claveria. we are working with the father, daughter and the son in law for the moment and the rest aren't too interested, but as our president says, little by little. ha. so the son in law is actually a member and helped us get in to the family. we taught them once and they had a quick question about the book of mormon and didnt understand it and why it was the word of god and etc, and so i explained how god loves all his childern and how in john 10 it talks about how he has other sheep and they have one shepherd, and that jesus went to go and visit them. which is what the book of mormon testifies about. . after i explained that they were just like, ohhhhhhhhhhhh, haha we were laught about it. but then we also had a super spiritual lesson with them and they loved it. the dad was thanking us and telling us that he was so happy, all his life he was looking for the true church and couldnt find it and he was just so happy that we came and sat him down and answered his questions, and was just really thankful. it was sweet.
Then this one day we found these gringo kids. they are super cool. and really funny. ones name is bernaice, and the other is named rodrigo. they are so freaking funny and are from california also. anyways we were talking to them a little and then we told them we had a movie in english for them to watch. their grandma wouldnt let us in so we had to go to the church and we watched the testaments there. they loved it. it was sweet. that movie is always so powerful to show. they had a lot of questions about it afterwards but we answered all their questions. i think that is the thing i love about our church, we literally have the answers to almost any question. but it literally is because we have a prophet today. living prophets rock. haha.
then we went with one of my favorite families here, the family reyes. with them we taught from the bible about the story of paul. there is a story of a man named stephen who was in the bible and testified, and is one of the only people to testify that Jesus and God are 2 different people. and then immediately after he was stoned to death. The people who stoned him was a group of angry people who sought out the apostles lives and one of them was Saul. Now if we remember Saul used to be a really bad guy. but later his named was changed to Paul and he became one of the most important Apostles. and most powerful. This should be an example to all of us because really we can all change, no matter how bad we are right now we can change to be the best we need to be. there is always hope and we can become the people we want to be. no matter how deep we are in sin, or how deep we are in trouble with people. we need to fear god and not man. we need to live our lives to our best so we are ok with him. it was a really neat lesson we had with them.
also something that i liked in church was there was the Stake president came to our ward and he gave a powerful talk. it was amazing. the guy will be a mission president one day i think. he better be. anyways he said something really powerful that i liked alot. he was talking about sin and how it is destroying us. and he ended with a personal quote from him. he said sin does not come to us, we look for sin. he said beer does not just randomly come to us, we go and buy it, or we go and look for it. porn does not just randomly come on our computer unless we go looking for it. i dont know why but i really liked it, but mainly because it is so true. . and then in priesthood we were talking about mothers and the importance of mothers in our lives. it was really cool. dont worry mom i really protected you. haha but really it got me thinking about how much i love you mom and how much you really have done for us. you are the best mom a kid could ask for. you tried your hardest with us kids and we are crazy and sometimes dont respect you but let me tell you we took you advantage of you. you always did so much for us and never really complained. ive learned that its the little things in life that make people happy that sometimes we dont ever appreciate. like when you would bring us food at work, or take us out to lunch from school, and etc. i love you so much mom and i miss you a ton. oh and also Hermana Guinac came to church today. she is so cool. haha she brought me a huge bag of goodies. sanwhiches, cookies, brownies, and nutella. it was sweet, she really does take care of me here. haha my mom away from home.
Wow this is a long letter but a lot of cool things happened this week. anyways also we had a activity in church and it went really well too. we talked about the pre mortal life and the things that the church teaches about what happened. it was way sweet. then we turned it personal. and we were talking about how all of us like members were all happy that we were going to be coming here to the earth and happy that we would be going to a family that hs the gospel. then there were some people who were sad and we didnt know why. so we asked them. why are you so sad. and they would say, well im not going to go to a family with the gospel and there might be a chance that i might get lost along the way and not return. and then we told them, dont worry friend, I´ll find you. we are here in this earth to find our friends and bring them to the truth. all members are missionaries and we need to help do our part and keep this work moving forward. but yeah. it was really sweet. then we played a game afterwords.
but yeah that is pretty much all that happened in a nutshell. i saved this part for last. we finally had the great opportunity of meeting our new president. President Stay and his wife Hermana Stay. THEY ARE AMAZING. they are so loving and just after getting to know them a little bit i love them. i had a 15 min personal interview with President stay and we spent the 15 mins talking about you guys, and then the last 5 mins he just gave me a really powerful testimony and told me some really personal stuff that he felt about me and the impressions he got from me. and it was amazing. the love that radiates from him was just so powerful. he was telling us the blessing that mission presidents have in loving their missionaries and how they are really blessed to love people so fast. when he talked i could really feel that. but yeah he is a super sweet man. he is a genius. did i mention he used to be in charge of the investing of the tithing money of the church. HE WAS IN CHARGE OF THAT. haha, he is so smart. but yeah im really happy to get to know him more and work for him in this mission. and the piñata is what we made for him. he loved it. haha.
that is pretty much my week. there is so much more but just know i love you guys and i am loving my time here. i miss you so much, but really there is nothing that would make me want to go home. my heart is officially here in guatemala and it is going to be hard to leave. im so happy i have 1 more year here to have a blast and learn new things and meet more people and change lives for the better. i love this work, i love this church and i love my savior Jesus christ. I know that we have a prophet and that he leads us in the right path to god. we need to follow him and we will be good. remember always, Fear God, Not Man.
well i will talk to you guys next week. have a great week.
love elder shipley
ps, i got the memory card that you sent with the suitcase that had the bday card in it but i never got one recently. the memory i have now is almost full though so if you can send one soon that would be great.
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