Hello, family and friends!
I love the story of the eagle. The eagle has the potential of living 70 years. At 40 years, it has to decide whether to keel over and die or to undergo a process of renovation. The process is painful and lasts 100 days. The eagle climbs the mountain, scratches off its curved claws and its useless beak, plucks its old plumes and is in constant pain. However, after the process, it can live 30 years more! All of us are like the eagle. We can say, “I’m too old to change. I have always lived this way.” Or, we can change and decide to have new life. We are using this story to help our investigators to change and recognize the worth of their souls in the eyes of their loving Heavenly Father!
Happy New Years! Church was full yesterday, full of people making the commitment to change and start the year off right. (Hopefully it doesn’t follow the same trends as the gym attendance in the USA, full in January and tapering off in March!) Our Ward Correlation was the best! It was full of motivated and sharp individuals who love the Lord and love missionary work.
Wow! This is the most supportive ward that I have ever been in. We use the Informe [report] and talk about families and their needs, both temporal and spiritual. Our mission plan is to do Family Home Evenings (FHE) in the houses of strong families in the ward, inviting their neighbors and our investigators, and the less-active members in their sector. For example, we mentioned that we did an FHE with the Lopez family and the leader asked, “What are their needs?” We mentioned that their kids have dengue fever and they immediately set about finding solutions to fumigate their house of mosquitoes. They all have great ideas. The ward is full of RMs that don’t hesitate to give us suggestions for how we can improve, which is awesome. Hey, that’s cool! And, they accompany us on the visits.
We visited a lot of less-active young women this week, together with YW of their own age. We did one of the Personal Progress goals together, about Individual Worth. We invited their moms to write the positive qualities that their daughters have and we also invited the daughters to do the same for their own mothers. (The idea is to bolster self-worth and also to improve harmony in the home with mothers and daughters.) We will follow up with them this week to see how they went. However, I don’t know how effective the visit was, because none of the YW attended church this week. Poco a poco (little by little).
We are working with Yesson, who has 9 years of inactivity in the church. We invited him to meet with the bishop (and he already set the appointment for this week!), we invited him to pray 5 times daily, and we invited him to attend church (and to play soccer with the missionaries in the mornings). He needs a lot of fellowshipping from the YSA. We found him by doing a Family Home Evening with the Pezo family.
This next week is full of FHEs (5 to be exact) and each one is different. Some of the leaders arrive to all of the FHEs, and we don’t want them to be bored, so we always have a variety of games and lessons. It’s fun for the missionaries, too.
Hna. Barrios is helping me to be so much healthier. She is a fitness buff and so we go running at 6:00 am or do aerobics with our pensionista, Vikki. It is so fun and gives me a lot of energy during the day. She’s helping me burn off the kilos of rice I have consumed in the course of 15 months in Peru. I always hoped I would get a parasite and lose weight really fast, but this is a much healthier method. Hna. Barrios (from Guatemala) is really wise and has great counsel, and so when she speaks, I listen and heed! She also has a great memory and is observant.(Sometimes I forget people’s names and didn’t recognize the Bishop’s wife on Sunday…yikes! That’s super awkward.)
Life is good! Happy New Year!
Love, Hermana Christensen
