July 15th
I have no clue where to start. After almost 3 months of hardwork in the field, and a little more than a month in the MTC, I have been blessed to not only witness, but perform a baptism! There are not words to describe the joy! D&C 18:15 is the only thing that I know that describes it. It showed me a different side of the Atonement. Obviously for Vito, it washed his sins away, and he is clean. But for me, it wiped all the worries and stresses from the past 4ish months, and replaced that with complete joy and happiness. I can´t describe it. I love you!!
Let me tell you a little about Vito. He is the head of a wonderful family. He has a wife, Elena (member), a son, Luis (non-member), two daughters, Rosie (not-yet-a-member) and Kerly (member). They are a great family, and strong in the Gospel, and I look forward to continuing to work with them.
But the funny thing is, that right after the baptism, there was the feeling of almost, "What do we do now?" The other Elders in our district told us that we´ve got our baptism for this area, so now we´re off the hook. Don´t worry, we´re still working, but it was kind of a weird feeling that we´ve accomplished (once) the "goal" of missionary work. I know that we are here to help people develop faith in the Atonement, show that faith by repenting and being baptized, and then using the gift of the Holy Ghost to help guide them to endure to the end of their lives, but still, after a baptism, everything is just awesome! and you feel complete.
Anyway, life goes on. I made tortilla de patata for the first time this past week. It turned out pretty good, but I´ve still got to practice making it. We are struggling with getting new investigators, and holding onto the investigators we do have which is rather frustrating. We´ll invite them to come unto Christ and do all we can to help them see and feel the importance of that, and then leave it in their hands.
Some of the investigators that we do have are:
Olga and David: A mom and her son that were a reference from a member, and really like the Book of Mormon. Olga has told us that the Book of Mormon is easier to understand than the Bible, and that she really wants to read it. David is 9 or 10, but has a really good understanding of the scriptures. We´ve just really got to work with them on pray. We asked David to give the prayer after our first lesson, and he looked at his mom and then started spouting off this poem as fast as he could with his eyes open and everything, and then finished and then looked around, and said, "Amen". It was the weirdest thing.
Carmen and Fernando: Also a mother and son who use to come to church all the time because of a missionary that use to be here in Lorca. We asked the members about this missionary, and they said that literally 15 investigators came to church every week just because of him. And so I think she´s just listening to us for kinda the same reason, to see if we are gonna be as cool as the last Elder that she knew. We´ll see what happens there.
Jessie: Daughter of a member named Paquita. She´s like 45 and use to be a teacher in Ecuador. We are helping her and some of her friends learn English and teaching just little messages of the Gospel to them, so hopefully one of them might start listening to us. Jessie, knows a lot about the church, and comes quite often.
That´s about all that´s happening in Lorca these days. The weather´s still nice and there is always a breeze, which makes life even better.
I love you all and am keeping you in my prayers!
Elder Garrett B Turley
July 22nd
Well, I´m technically a trained missionary. But now that I´m trained, they told me I´m training, so I will be picking up my new companion (here in the mission, they call the missionaries you train your sons/daughters, so I´ll be going to pick up my son tomorrow). Pray for me will ya? I decided that like it says in Alma 32, I can either choose to be humble right now, or be forced to be humble in a couple weeks when I figure out there is no stinkin´ way I can train with just my knowledge. I hope and pray that I can choose to be humble.
This past Sunday, we had what seemed to be like a ton of people at church. We had 50 people at church, including 7 investigators. We were so pumped. When we talked to our branch president about it, he said, "Before the earthquake, we had like 80 people attending regularly. 50´s nothing." So I guess we got excited for nothing. We also have 2 investigators that just got married (Her name is Pillar and I don´t know his name, I didn´t even know they were investigators until yesterday. They have already been attending church for quite some time, and their testimonies are super strong. But they will be getting baptized sometime in the next couple weeks.) And we have another couple getting married, hopefully, in August. This couple is actually the daughter, and would be son-in-law of Vito. So just about the whole family will be members after this.
July 28th
So the first 24 hrs of training, were the hardest 24 hrs of my life. I thought I had been getting good at Spanish, but I couldn´t understand my companion and we had almost no one to visit, so we kind of just winged it and tried to visit old investigators. Over the past couple days we have knocked over 300 doors, and we are finding people to teach. One man, named Yuria, is from Bulgaria, and we watched the Restoration video with him in Bulgarian. And guess what, the church is true in Bulgarian as well. I could feel the Spirit, and I hope he could too. We also found a lady named Nancy to teach (we were literally led to her house by the Spirit, it was the coolest thing ever). We are stopping by there again to continue teaching her. I am now playing the piano in church officially (I even have a nametag!) and I feel kind of bad for the members, because I´m not exactly the best pianst. I have this feeling that pretty soon the Pres. Luis (our branch president) is gonna kick me out, and play the piano himself. But I´ll keep trying until that point. I also gave a talk yesterday on Elder Andersen´s talk from last conference called, "It´s a Miracle" and I hope the members got something out of it. I encourage you to read it, and do what it says, to pray about who you can share the gospel with, and "names and faces will come to your mind" and "you will see your own miracles".
Life is good, and the work moves on. We are getting so many new missionaries in this next transfer, 35 if I heard correctly, and we just received 21. The Lord really is hastening his work.
I love you, and hope everything goes well with school and work and at home!
Elder Garrett B Turley
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| Elder Oldroyd, Vito, and Garrett These are Pictures of Garretts apartment |
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