Week 82: Little by Little

Elder Sosa and I with Johan (He is the autistic boy, who LOVES Jesus Christ and the church so much!!)

So this week was interesting. We have been having trouble finding new investigatores and our current investigators don't seem to want to progress. But we have been having a lot of success with many of the less active members. The less active family that we have been teaching came to church again!! Wooo 3 times in a row!! We are excited because we have made it a goal for the father of this family to baptize his two daughters, so now he is even more committed to going to church. We also found a couple other less active members and we were able to get one of the young adults to come to church. 

We also had our zone conference last friday. It is kind of sad because we are one of the only zones that has their conferences by themselves but that is because we are the farthest away in the mission. We learned about repentance and about how great a gift it is that we are able to repent. That we are able to escape the punishment of sin because of the Savior´s sacrifice and by following his instructions of repentance and baptism. 

So our goal right now has been to help out the branch. And we decided to focus on the little things that everyone should be doing like praying and reading their scriptures. We have noticed that the majority of the members do not do these simple things. Also we have been waiting for one of the branch leaders to take action, but that has not happened and because we are not going to sit and watch the grass grow, we have decided to take the initiative. So we basically taught everyone that they need to read their scriptures and study their scriptures everyday. Also we started a class of gospel principles to teach all of the less active members that seem to not know the basics of the church, like the restoration. But it is going along well and I think that we are going to see some progress in these next few weeks. 

It was also Johans birthday yesterday so we celebrated his birthday on saturday (because Johan likes to keep the sabbath day holy). And on sunday we had a little party but it was without music. 

Oh something else cool that happened was we decided to help out the Elders quorum president with the lesson. Every sunday the class is always so boring because we just read out of the manual. It is like the priesthood lesson in the movie, The RM. And that is because he never prepares the lesson. So we decided to go in the week to help him out and teach him how to prepare the lesson. So we taught him how to study the lesson first and to answer the questions. Then on saturday when we came back to help him finish he thanked us for helping him and told us that we are the only people that have ever taught him how to prepare a lesson since he has been Elders quorum president. That was over 4 years ago!! Then on sunday he was pretty nervous to give his lesson but we helped him out. We participated alot in his class and it still wasnt super great, but it was a lot better than the other lessons he has had to teach. But after the last hour of church he thanked us for our help and told us that he is excited to start learning this year.

But that was pretty much our week. We are hoping to start focusing more on helping out the less active members but we know that we cannot do it alone and that we need the help of the other members. 

love you all so much hope you have a great week. 

Elder Snyder

With Johan and some members of our branch