Coming in, from Teziutlan‏

December 12, 2011

Alright, let's get hoppin'.

So, this week has been pretty interesting, we were able to see Fernanda, who I mentioned before, get baptized, which was awesome. But I guess I'm starting from the most recent part of the week, whoops. What else happened last week... Hmm... I dunno! After a while in the same area with the same companion, things just kind of move regularly. Not to say that we're losing fire or excitement, just that nothing really different has happened recently.
Haha I guess I have a sort of funny little story. How about a ''high and low'' here, eh? But this ''high and low'' is brought to you lovely folks by ''Old People''.
So I guess I'll explain myself and start with the low. This last week, I've been trying to picture everyone I see in white baptismal clothes, to motivate me more to talk to them about the gospel and all that. Well, we were heading to District Class on Tuesday, and I saw a nice looking older lady holding hands with a nice looking old man. I pictured them in white clothes and thought, ''what a cute old couple, just ready to go for baptism''. Well, as we got closer, the old man started glaring at us, and as we said a friendly ''buenos días'' to him, he frowned in a murderous way and spat at us and kept walking, muttering some swear words. So, that was pretty cool. My comp. and I just laughed and kept going with the day.
Now, let's go with the high. The strangely high.
The next old person we saw I believe that same day in the afternoon, was a nice looking old lady. My companion and I presented ourselves and started to contact her, when she exclaimed that we were very very handsome white boys. We gratefully accepted the complement and forged on to testify to her, but in between every few words she had to comment on how handsome we are, and how beautiful our eyes are, and how tall we are, etc. When we finally finished testifying, we asked if we could come by and teach her sometime. She replied that she was already married, but we said we'd love to teach her husband as well. She told us she didn't think he'd like that, again commenting on how handsome we are, shook our hands very warmly, and went on her way. So... It was pretty interesting, but really funny and it doesn't hurt to hear that sort of thing every once in a while I guess. =P
Anyway, I don't know of anything else really that happened in the week... Fernanda got baptized, as mentioned, but wasn't able to go to church to get confirmed because her family (a mix of catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses) blew up on her and forbade her from going to church. Apparently her husband is being pretty harsh about it, and we don't really know how we'll get her there to be confirmed, but we'll have to somehow. She's soooo good, and ready for the gospel in her life, but, as happens a lot here, the people around her don't seem to understand that God has given us the freedom to choose. I know it'd be hard for me to deal with someday if my wife fell away from the church or something and started going to a different church or who knows what, and I do whatever I could to help her back, but I also know that free agency is a gift from God, and NOBODY has the right to take it away. No matter how much it'd hurt me, I wouldn't do it. I just don't understand sometimes how people professing to know God's commandments and His ways can do something as barbaric as take away completely the free agency of someone and try to enslave them to beliefs that aren't their own.
But, be as it may, I'm sure we'll figure something out, and I know her family is just trying to do the best thing for her, even if she and my companion and I know that there's something better out there for her.
Anyway though, we'll be dealing with that somehow this week, even though we'll be in Veracruz for a couple days, I'm sure things will work out.
We'll be leaving tomorrow morning to get to the port in time, and we'll be staying the night there with another three or four zones. I have no doubt that there will be no sleeping involved, but I'm hoping and praying that I'll get at least a couple hours in. Then we'll go to the temple on Wed. morning and have the conference after that. I'm pretty excited for it, to be honest, but it'll be weird not being in our area so long. We probably won't get back until really late Wed. night or Thursday afternoon.
Then this Saturday there should be another baptism of a woman we've been teaching named Marcela. I think I've mentioned her. She's now been to church 3 times, and she's excited and ready to take the step of baptism. It's interesting to see how quickly people are ready to take such a large step. It's also interesting to see how the people that take a longer amount of time to ''prepare themselves'' for baptism better, don't get baptized. They get comfortable with the situation they've got, the knowlege they have, and of course Satan has all that time to be working on them and giving them more and more reasons to hesitate. That's why we need to walk by faith. If we wait to know something for sure, being humans, we'll just get less and less certain the longer we take thinking about it. It's like an exam for school. Almost all of the time your first instinct to answer a question is the right one, but when you really think hard and second guess yourself, you'll get it wrong a lot more. Something I learned from experience^^
Well, I guess that's the update for the week. Today we went to Tlapacoyan, about an hour away, to play soccer against the other Elders of the zone. We have our own district jerseys and shorts that we just got, I think you'll like them, but I can't send a picture in this place, so next week you'll see. We just played for fun, not keeping track of who won how many games (but our district won the majority ;P), so it ended up pretty fun.
Aaaanyway though, I guess that's it!
Hope you're all enjoying the Christmas season, it's pretty interesting here. Today everyone is celebrating some anniversary of a Mexican guy seeing the Virgin Mary, so that's definitely interesting.
Have a good week, y'all!

Elder DeFreese