Week 52: Wanna Fish!?!?!

 How y'all doing? I'm doing well.


A while ago Elderr Sánchez was trying to tell Elder Strock, "wanna fight?" but he didn't know how to pronounce it so he ended up saying "wanna fish?" So now that's become a saying in the zone for whenever we're angry or annoyed. All I could think of was the veggietales movie of Jonah when the people of Ninevah were slapping each other with fishes. 

When this transfer started I really wanted to have at least one more baptism here in Pueblo Libre, this being my 4th transfer here. I reminded myself that my assignment here is to do what the Lord asks, and all other things will fall into place. We continued to meet with Javier this week. Now we just need to have him get a testimony of the Book of Mormón. He's fulfillinh the commitments we're giving him, but he just needs to take that little step. Hopefully we can try to put him on date next week. I guess there was a littlw miracle this week. On new year's day as we were going around knocking on the doors of our friends to remind them about church I felt an impression to go down and invite a boy named Mathias we had talked to the day before. We hadn't really shared much with him, bit I delt it was the spirit so we went. As we were going there we bumped into Héctor. He's a young man who was working at the vet when we were teaching Josai back in November. I had asked him if he wanted to hear a message from us back at the end of November but in between that and when we went to meet him hermana Flor told us he got fired so we didn't know where to meet him. But here we ran into him working with the garbage. I asked him again if he'd be interested to hear a message, but he said that the last time I didn't come. but I told him we couldn't find him and so we set up another appointment. We knocked the door of Marhias and he wasn't there. We had a few lessons with Héctor this week and he wants to change his life and get closer to God. Both Javier and Héctor came to church with us on Sunday so we'll see what the next week brings. Although I think Héctor said he might be moving back to Ecuador soon so we'll see what happens there.

On Thursday we had a zone council and then we're going to have a zone conference next week with President. All the DL's were asked to prepare a small training section and I was asked to prepare mine on the importance of studies and how to do them well. I think it went pretty well and I used good scriptures and examples. We learned a little about how we should present the law of chastity and celestial marriage a little earlier than normal. We'll learn more about that in the zone conference. Afterwards we had a little celebration because it was Elder Stringham's birthday. We even had some 3 day old donuts thay Elder Kennedy and Elder Huachaca made with their pensionista. It was an American recipe and yheir pension loved them so much that she wanted to sell them. I'm sure they were great I just wish I could've eaten a fresh one.

After the council I went on exchanges with Elder Strock. Dos gringos is pretty fun. We had a few lessons with Javier and Maylin and her family before we went to the stake activity, which was a bunch of "olympic" games. It seems like we just go to these things now to hang out with the other elders. One of the random street dogs that wandered in decided to do his business right there on the grass in front of us. I guess not everyone has my tendency to look at the ground while I'm walking so I'm sad to say there were a lot of stains everywhere. After that we did some finding and had a lesson with Fanny, well, almost. We got there and started talking with her, her mom, and her brother, both of whom are members. As soon as we were about to start the lesson Fanny just went up the stairs and left. Didn't say anything just left. That was weird. So we didn't end up sharing something with her even after we waited a while. We shared something with the other 2 and called it a night.

The next day Elder Strock and I got around to talking about life, ourselves, and the mission. It turns out he was trained by someone I knew in highschool, Ryan Weiskircher. Small world. He said in his mission a friend had to come to church 6 times to get baptized, while here in Trujillo Noete it's just 2. It made me think a lot about that and how honestly even if the mission doesn't raise the minimum number of church attendances, I should for myself. Because what we're trying to do is convert, not just baptize. From experience with our recent converts it probably would've helped them a lot to have come to church more than just 2 times before baptism. A little bit more practice with commitment keeping to see who really is ready to make the ultimate commitment of baptism. My recent converrts still come, just not as much as I'd like and with not as much devotion to the gospel as I would've hoped. On Saturday I gave the interview for a baptism in Esperanza, Evelin. She's 8 and was so funny. She was baptized and kind of just slipped under the water.

But on Sunday we got both Javier and Héctor to come to church. I'm always a little scared when investigators come to second hour because the quorum de elderes y escuela dominical always seem to get a little off track. This time they were going around asking everyone hiw long they've been in the church. Luckily they both handled it well abd were able to share some spiritual experiences. While I was trying to synchronize to the other elder's areabooks on the phone areabook went through it's update thing which is fine but since we weren't in our account at the time we got locked out of our own areabook. President Hiatt also told us that instead of having a normal mission zoom call we'd all watch the Elder and Sister Holland devotional, which was great. Really focused in on what faith, charity, and especially hope are. It was a good devotional to kick off the year.

That's all for me! Have a great week!

Elder Jensen

1/3. Bautismo de Evelin 
2. Pday fun (We got together as a district with the ZLs to watch God's Army with snacks and drinks. I don't recommend it for people who want to know what the mission is like)
4. ...
5. I finally got a video of our singing and dance performance at our Christmas party!










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