Good People

April 20, 2015

I caught a Piranha!

Padre Bernardo is a small town that has people with the biggest hearts. I love the people here. This week was full of difficulties but also full of blessings and miracles. Padre Bernardo is growing to be one of my favorite areas on my mission! It has been so fun to open this area, being a small town, people noticed and started to talk about us real fast. It is not every day that 2 young men, 2 being from the USA walk around in the blazing heat with shirts and ties. This week was so great that I don’t even know where to start.

So at the beginning of the week we started to think about the way we are doing the work here. We had been working super hard, teaching, teaching and teaching. We got a little frustrated because the majority of the people we are teaching love our visits but are not trying to learn more. They are not keeping their commitments. We decided we were doing the work all wrong. We got here and we were hungry for baptism’s and the church to grow super-fast but then we realized that just knocking on every door and teaching was not the best way to do the work. We are here and we are the first contact that most of the people here have ever had with the church. So it is even more important to leave a good image and impression of the church and of the missionaries here. We put ourselves in the place of the people here and what they think about us. So, we decided to change the work a lot. We started to attend meetings of other churches with our investigators and man is it cool to see how other churches work. Everyone there treats us super well and they get very happy that we are visiting them! Even some people said that they want to visit where we congregate too! We are going to go on the radio, do more service and be happy and friends with everyone. After we made that decision, the work here exploded! We aren’t the missionaries who will try to force our religion on people anymore, We are those Mormon boys who are here to help the city in any way we can!

Elders

Our first week we had only 14 people, 10 not counting us, 4 not including the 2 families that are members already, and this week, with our new philosophy and excitement...... WE HAD 31 PEOPLE GO TO CHURCH WITH US! The best part was that they were families! We got super, super excited! Everyone that came to church liked the meetings a whole lot! Only about half of the people that promised to come to church did. The missionaries (us) gave the talks for sacrament meeting and I think that will be the first of many talks that we will give (haha). We have many other people who are reading the Book of Mormon and who want to know if the church is true that didn’t go to church. We love it here and the work exploding! We have one family who told us that they want to be able to say the same things that we say about the church and about our Savior, and almost all the families want to feed us lunch! We eat with Silo and his family (only members who live here) everyday, haha so it will be good to take a load off them.

This upcoming week we have much to do! We are going to the radio to let people know about the church, we are going to have lunch with a family of pastors that are very interested in the Book of Mormon. Who have about 100 people who go their church too, Can you imagine? We need your prayers! The heat is trying to beat us. But we are going to work through it, pray that we have cloudy days! I love this work and I love every single blessing that the Lord sends my way. This would be impossible without Him.

OH! Today we went to a lake and went fishing for piranhas! We had to use the heart of a cow to catch them! Then we had a BBQ, one of the best p-days of my mission!

All my love!

Elder Clark