Week 58: Spiritual Experiences and Darth Maul Duck?

 We saw a lot of miracles this week! I hope you are all doing well and having a great time!


The first miracle came on Monday, right after pday ended. We had a lesson planned with Fabricio, and his grandma had an ear infection so we went to give her a blessing too. While there we saw Fabricio's mom go up the stairs. For those who don't know Fabricio accepted baptism a few weeks ago and really wants to do it, (and he's also one of the most intelligent kids I've taught on the mission), but his mom didn't give her permision, on grounds that he's too young, not mature enough, etc. She also has a difficult schedule and is rarely in the house. Upon seeing her there, I know it was our chance. I invited Fabricio to invite her down to be present for the blessing. She came down and the blessing was powerful (She recovered very fast from it, she has a lot of faith). Afterwards we started to talk with his mom and the conversation got to the topic of Fabricio and baptism. She started out firm in her opinions and expressed them directly. Since she thought that he had to be more mature to be baptized, I asked her how old she thought we were. I asked her why would God send us, who are 18 and 20 years old, who are unwise, immature, and inexpierenced, to do the most important thing in the history of time, which is sharing the restored gospel. That's crazy! From there my Elder Larkin used Ether 12:27, and she started to soften her heart. Not completely, but she started to admit we had points. This discussion lasted about and hour and a half, and the spirit was present and worked on her heart while we brought up multiple topics with hermana Maria helping too. By the end, she finally said that she still thinks Fabricio should be more mature, but that she wasn't going to stop him if it was what he wanted. So we asked Fabricio if he wanted to be baptized, and he said yes. We put him on date for March 4th! This has been one of the best experiences I've had on my mission and is one I'll never forgot. 

It was already past 9:30 which was when my leadership meeting started. I ended up listening to it while we walked along the highway for 15 minutes and while on the bus. At the end Elder Gerber was deciding who should give the closing prayer, and I was praying and crossing my finger that it wouldn't be me while looking at my como, because the APs and President were on the call and it was way after the time we need to be in our apartments. To my horror he called my name. I gave a quick prayer, but everyone still heard the bus music. No one's said anything, but I'm sure they'd be fine because we were following the spirit and put Fabricio on date.

On Tuesday we had our devotional with Elder S Mark Palmer and Elder Becerra of the Seventy and their wives. Both of their wives spoke about the conversions of their grandparents. Elder Becerra shared an excellent piece on the teaching portion of our job as missionaries. He said some things I'm definitely going to change in my lessons. Elder S Mark Palmer talked about being a successful missionary and gave one of the most powerful testimonies about the Book of Mormon and the Savior that I've ever heard. His New Zealand accent was awesome and he had a translator translate for him. He said some things that have kept going through my mind that I'm going to change as well. Before the meeting portion we separated into both missions and got photo with them all. One Elder from our mission is actually from the same ward as the Becerras, so they called him out by his first name. We didn't get much time to talk to people, but it was fun to get glimpses of some of the people from the south mission. After that I did some baptismal interviews for the ZLs.

On Wednesday we did some service for one hermana in our ward. With her brother we fixed their chicken/turkey/duck coop that had collapsed because of the rain. Man those turkeys look kinda ugly. They all had weird colors and the ducks all looked like Darth Maul! I once again paid for my stupidity of not using sunscreen, even though the sun wasn't shining. We spent a few hours trying to map out the area but the directions are sososososo bad here it takes forever just to get a small section done. We might just have to clump it all together and call it good. We later had some lessons that were very powerful. We started teaching hermana Emelyn's brother, Yonan. Elder Larkin actually went ahead and took the lead and did a pretty good job of it! We went with Bryan, our pensionista's grandson, and he's really fun. He's 16 and is still learning a lot. (Why do bus drivers have to be so weird? Charging so many overpriced prices for stuff and if you give too much they don't give you your change hahdjnsjksyx) We had another lesson with a member reference, Diana, and that was an awesome lesson because the holy ghost was putting words directly into my mouth and boy could I feel it! Did some more late night baptismal interviews for Jardines.

On Thursday we got to go to the temple! It was so cool after 6 months to understand it all in Spanish. But the weirdest part about it is that we did it with Presidente Parsons and his wife from the Trujillo South mission. In fact, most of the missionaries in our session were from the south mission. But it was a great time to refocus myself and think about the Savior's role in my life. I bought the gospel artbook from the distribution center as well.

On Friday I went on exchanges with Elder Yataco. We had hermano Edward come with us to a few lessons. We visited some families and had some good lessons. But the next day I woke up at 5am with a lot of pain in my abdomen. I couldn't go back to sleep and was on the toilet for 2 hours. I threw up a few times and felt kind of weak. I got food poisoning again, this time I think it was the spaghetti we ate for dinner, because Elder Yataco felt the same. Funny, both times I've gotten food poisoning it's been from foods deemed safe by the mission. (packaged foods/food from the pension) Anyway I didn't eat much that day and took a nap but got back to working and I feel fine now.

On Sunday we saw Fabricio, Nayeli, Maria, and Yonan come to church! Still working on the rest but it's still good. There were some weird mic problems that almost destroyed our ears. A baby even started crying. Afterwards we did some weekly planning and finally got around to calling our references that were stacking up. (All they are are just people who aren't actually interested or never answer) and planned a little bit for Khaory's baptism.

Today we played some spikeball and fútbol at the field here in Huanchaco. I can't travel anywhere because we still have a week left in the month and I have practically no money. It's just that every trip out of Huanchaco costs almost 14 soles...

But that's all for this week of miracles! It seems like this was a really special week for everyone in the mission, so I hope we can keep this up! I hope that you have an absolutely fantastic day!

Elder Jensen

1. Fixing the bird coop
2. Darth Maul duck?
3. Soy Elder Rios
4/5. Templo
6. All the mission!
7. Distinto Huanchaco 
8. Elder Richards with all his sons











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