Monday, March 19, 2012

3-19-12

Hola familia!!!

Happy St. Patricks day! Haha. We celebrated here with our first rain of the season! The rain season starts at the first of April next month, and I hear it gets pretty crazy. So we´ll see soon enough :)
This has been another hard long week, but a good week. Elder Rich and I are striving to edify ourselves before The Lord so that we can be more receptive to The Spirit and be better instuments in His hands. I have grown alot this week though, and I love how the hard times build you up higher and stronger.
UPDATE ON INVESTIGATORS
- Shaít is at the top of the list right now - he is on FIRE!!!! He´s keeping almost all of his commitments and is attending church every Sunday. He has truly had a change of heart and we can´t wait to baptize him on the 31st!! We´re planning on baptizing him in-between sessions of General Conference :) (I have more to say about that later.)

- Melissa is coming along..... we haven´t had as many lessons this week with her as we would´ve liked to, but there is progress. Right now we are trying to help her keep the Word of Wisdom. She struggles a bit with it - she usually likes to chill out every weekend with friends and with a beer or two. I know as long as we stress to her gaining her own personal testimony though, The Lord can help her if she has that desire. We are only instruments in The Lord´s hands - we will do everything we can to try and help her gain a personal testimony.

- Rod..... eh..... has not answered any of our calls this week. Haha...we are beginning to think he just wanted to speak english to someone? :)

- New awesome investigator:: Jenny!!!! Wow. This lady is real awesome. Elder Rich and I are SO excited to start teaching her. We got her as a reference from the sisters (Good ol´ Hermana Lopez) and we weren´t able to get a hold of her for a few weeks, but this week we finally tracked her down and she is amazing!!!! Very humble - and that is what The Lord is looking for. She has a 10 year old daughter as well that we would love to baptize also! Hopefully things continue to go real well with her in the coming weeks.

        All right, so Friday, we had a stake activity, and it was SUPER sweet! The stake is putting on a cultural month where we will celebrate different countries and cultures once a week, and they are PERFECT activities for investigators to come to. This first week they celebrated Dom. Republic and Columbia. We brought Shaít along and guess what?? His Dad is from Columbia!! We got his Dad to come too!!! And man did Shaít love it. A good, good Friday night, folks.


        Ok and yesterday..... what a GREAT Sunday! It was a televised conference from SLC for ALL of central America!! I didn´t understand all of it cuz it was all translated to spanish, but holy cow it was sweet :) The speakers were Ann Dibb of the Young Womens, Don R. Clark (One of the Seventy representitives for Central America), L. Whitney Clayton of the Presidency of the Seventy, and Boyd K. Packer!!!! It was seriously like General Conference - but it was only for central america!!! Super awesome. Such a testimony of how this is The Lord´s true church to me - the church works in such proficiency (I really forgot how to spell that word). But anyway.... my favorite part of the conference? The closing hymn :) It was ¨Grande Eres Tu¨ (How Great Thou Art) and I was singing with Shaít. The Spirit was SOO strong!!!!!!!! Wow!!! While singing, I just pictured Christ up front at the pulpit smiling down at all of us Panamanians and being so pleased as we praised him through song :) The Spirit was so strong to me, and I know Shaít felt it too - which was a great testimony builder for him. After the hymn, he turned to Elder Rich and I and commented on how powerful the song had been, and that he loved it! He also asked us if we could somehow get him a hymnbook - we´re hoping to when we go to the temple sometime. I keep hoping we´ll go the the temple one of these p-days as a zone, but it´s hard to set up an appointment, and you have to go as a zone. I really wanna go before I leave Chorrera :)

       Another reason I loved the conference yesterday is cuz it got me SOOOOOOOO excited for General Conference!!!!!!!! It´s only like two weeks away!!!!!!!! What a blessing it is to have a modern day prophet who recieves direction straight from The Source of All Truth, our Savior, and then tells the whole world!!! The church leaders and Apostles are so inspired and I´m so dang excited!!!! I´ve been told we might even be able to listen to it in english too, which would be cool so I could catch every last word :)
I love you all SO MUCH!!!! Keep doing well and praying and reading and I know The Lord will bless us for our efforts.

-Elder Clarke

P.S...... Katie, I want to see you perform SO BAD!!!! It´s so good to hear you have been doing so well with the singing and such with the YW conference!!! Good luck with it this upcoming week, and I will really try to write back in the coming weeks. You´re a studdette :)

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