Hey ya'll, well this week has been off the wall!
First off Mom and Dad you're gonna be proud of me for this one, and all the rest of you should be too haha. This week I ate ceviche, for those of you who don't know what this is.. It is raw fish that they soak in lemon juice and apparently the acids in the lemon juice somehow "cook" the meat so its okay to eat. It surprisingly was pretty good. The texture and idea of it was a little weird but I ended up liking it and my stomach didn't freak out at me for eating it so that was a plus! Then after that I ate chicken feet. Okay now these on the other hand were pretty gross. How you have to eat it is you put the entire foot in your mouth then kinda pick it apart with your tongue until all the little bones separate from the meat. The bones you spit out on your plate and you swallow whats left. I didn't like that much haha the meat was like pastey and left a bad aftertaste. Anyways though I never thought I would eat two foods that weird in the same sitting. The members we were eating with loved it. They were pounding those feet down like they they were popcorn chicken!
Second crazy thing that happened this week has to do with our investigator Pedro. So he's the guy that was having those weird health problems that he said were from the mosquito disease he got in the army. Well we passed by his house on tuesday and his sister answered the timbre and told us he was in the hospital because he had almost had a heart attack! Yep everyone's having heart attacks lately, but we will get to that later.. so the next day we stopped by with some cookies and were able to get to know his family a bit which was cool.
Wednesday morning we got to play soccer with our old group of fútbol homies again and we surprised them haha. They split the teams up all us missionaries against their team of all spaniard teenagers which everyone thought would be super unfair. They thought they were gonna destroy us. Well.. we completely wrecked them, it was hilarious. We had scored over 10 goals and they hadn't even scored one when they finally admitted defeat and decided we should mix up the teams. So yeah we have improved a ton with our soccer skills 😏 Now its actually pretty fun to play haha
Thursday morning a family moved out of the branch here. They live out in a little pueblo about 20 minutes away and they wanted to pack up the furgoneta at 5:30 before the sun came up and got hot so we got up at 5am and the branch president came and picked us up to go help out. Oh yeah and a furgoneta is like basically just a big van, thats what they use to move here. It literally took us only like 30 minutes to load it haha.
Alright here for the coolest part of the week. So about a week or two ago our brach president asked us to try to track down an old menos activo family. So we had been going around to all the members trying to see if anyone had any way of contacting them. Finally we found an address this week so we decided to head out there Friday morning to visit them. So we walk way out there and ring the timbre. The dad comes out to meet us. He's this short older guy and he has this massive scar all the way down the inner side of his leg. He explained to us that he had suffered two heart attacks this past month and that they had to take veins from is leg to put into his heart. He lifted up his shirt and showed us the huge scars he had there too. It was pretty crazy. So they invited us in and we sit down and he talks to us for about an hour just telling us his entire life story. It was absolutely crazy but also really awesome. He was a journalist for 35 years and lived in 22 different countries mostly throughout south and central america! He has 7 children so thats a family of 9 which is a ridiculous thing for any Spaniard since the average family has 1-2 kids. Anyways so he did all that for years and years then he finally gets back to spain to retire and they give him a pension of 366 euros a month! For a family of 9. That is completely ridiculous. So he has basically written big articles and been interviewed by the news for the past couple of years about it. (For those of you who are spanish speakers I will post the one he gave me on the icloud.) Anyways just saying how unjust it is and stuff because there are literally criminals who have recently been released from prison that they give 800 euro pensions to for just one single person. So yeah its just really crazy his whole situation trying to support that huge family with so little money. So we talked to them for a while then the next day we took them some cookies since we still had quite a bit left over. When we were talking to him he said that night after they left he and his wife were talking and she said "I think its time we start going to church again." So now in a couple more weeks once he feels a bit better they are coming to church, and tonight we are going over to their house to have a noche de hogar! So that is super awesome and exciting. We'll see how it goes :)
Well cool yeah so thats the coolest thing that happened but besides that I have another talk in church yesterday. My topic was Sostengamos a los Profetas. It was a good one I really enjoyed the preparation part, the talking part not quite as much but only like the first minute was a struggle then I felt pretty comfortable up there. I was able to share a little bit about how great of an effect my goal to read and listen to 2-3 conference talks every day has had on me. How it has helped me to receive personal revelation and inspiration on how I can be a better missionary and as a person in general.
Here is a short little cita out of the Gospel Principles book that I really liked-
"Many people live in darkness, unsure of God’s will. They believe that the heavens are closed and that people must face the world’s perils alone. How fortunate are the Latter-day Saints! We know that God communicates to the Church through His prophet. With grateful hearts, Saints the world over sing the hymn, “We thank thee, O God, for a prophet to guide us in these latter days” (Hymns, no. 19).
Preparing and giving the talk made me feel so much more grateful to have a prophets and apostles guiding us today. It is a huge sign to me that God still loves all of his children. Knowing that the living prophet Thomas S. Monson and all of the apostles lead the church today under the direction of Jesus Christ is a great blessing and comfort. Once again I invite all of you to take the time to study the words of the prophets and apostles, they truly receive revelation for those living in the world today. I invite you to set a goal maybe just one a week on sunday afternoons. However big or small your goal is I can promise that you will see the blessings. I have had so many days this past year where I am trying to figure out some problem of my own or of someone we are working with and I read the conference talk and my answer is right there! Anyways so I invite you to do it and I promise you will see the same results!
Hope you all enjoyed the letter, sorry its so long haha. Have a wonderful week!
LOVE YA 💙💙
- Elder Childers
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