Nelson and Edna Tie the Knot

Well, another fantastic week!! We had lots of great things happen and some exciting things going down in Santiago!!! 

Let’s start off with the marriage of Nelson and Edna (the Haitian couple) on Saturday which was incredible!! It went so well! The entire ward was there and we had a great time!!! The ceremony went well, we ate delicious Haitian food and we enjoyed spending time with all the members!! It was a really cool missionary opportunity as well to see their family and family friends show up and to meet the members and to be inside the church. They were dancing and enjoying themselves.. It was really neat to see Edna and Nelson so happy on their special day! It was really special and the ward did an incredible job of putting this on! Highlight of the week!

On Sunday, we had a really good turnout with our investigators and we had quite a few people show up for our class the second hour, including a lady that was a neighbor of another investigator!! She enjoyed the class and even appears to be really receptive.

On Monday, we had a missionary activity with the young men in our ward where they came to lessons and worked with us for a couple hours! it was great to see them working with us and excited to share the gospel! (there were 7 that came!)

Following that, we had a Family Home Evening lesson with a family from our ward that has an investigator living in their house named Sadrack! Elder Moore promised him that if he came to church, he would find work, and sure enough after the second week, he found it! We had a great family home evening and we helped Sadrack accept a baptismal date and he along with the family are excited about that! We had a great lesson on baptism!

It’s been a great week and I wanted to even share some of my personal feelings about having the young men come and visit with me! It was cool to see that even they were looking forward to being missionaries and talked with our investigators about that! Really neat! Made me think back on my aspirations to serve and looking back through my mission experiences thus far, it is so worth it! The reflection and looking back and seeing the good it turns one into by serving others and just trying to help others is a gratifying work. It is worth doing.For anyone deciding or debating on whether or not to go; GO. 

It's Fall in Santigo

This week was great! we had a really good day and we saw some great miracles this week! 

Namely, with Edna Bernard! Her husband was baptized two years ago, and she is now getting married this weekend! We had to go with them to the civil registry and we did their paperwork in preparation for their marriage this Saturday! We are really excited for them! They are a great family and the ward is all in on the planning and putting this wedding together!

We had an open chapel this past Sunday in another ward in our stake. This activity consist of us getting people to come into the church for a 15 minute tour of our church where we explain basic fundamental teachings and show the baptismal font and talk about baptism! The idea is great, but the only difficult part is getting people in! We had no luck for the first hour and a half! There weren’t that many people on the streets and we had been getting denied until we came across a lady by the name Elizabeth. We approached her and we wanted to contact her but before we could speak, she asked us, ´”what do you believe happens after this life?”´ We were absolutely shocked!, We expressed to her the importance of families and about what happens beyond the grave and our belief on eternal families. She told us about how her son had passed away and how she had felt with the difficulty of losing him. We invited her in and she came and really enjoyed the capilla abierta! 

That was a really gratifying experience! and helped me know that there will always be people who NEED this message of what comes after this life! I am excited to see how it goes for them in the next few weeks for the elders of that ward!

Carlos' Baptism and Door Knocking

This week was an incredible one!! We were able to see so many miracles!

I’ll start with the Brake Family!! While we were returning to our house from a lunch appointment, we were walking down the street and we said hi to this lady in the park as we were walking by and she responded saying, ´Hola Elderes.´ That phrase puts every missionary into contact mode. We stopped, turned around and began talking to her. She was a Peruvian lady that had recently moved to Chile some 2 months back and was baptized in Peru. She has 4 children who moved to Chile as well! So we came by two days later to talk to the family and we met her son, William Brake!! He wants to be a missionary and is awesome! He has even been working on his family search and is a really GOOD kid. So their family name is Brake and it’s because their grandparents are African Americans who moved to Peru! 

Nonetheless, we went over and got to know the family and they are awesome! We invited them to our baptism the following day and then to church! Sure enough, William showed up but the mom couldn’t because she had a conflict and wasn’t able to make it.

And of course onSaturday, we had the baptism of Carlos Carreño! It was an incredible day! The baptism service was  wonderful and Carlos was really touched by the program and his baptism! He will be a great member of the church and will be a friend forever! We have such a great relationship with him and it was such a great experience to get to know him and to be there to share that special day with him!

The following day, Carlos was confirmed and even was the first person to offer to clean the church in Elders Quorum when they asked who could do it!! He will be a great addition to the quorum!

On Monday, I had one of the coolest experiences of my mission. We were on Divisions with the assistants and we had a good day and our plans fell through the last hour and around 9:45, 15 minutes before we had to enter into the house, we were on the street and I didn’t have any other plans or ideas. So, I thought, ya we will walk down the street and the first house with a light on, we will contact it! We walked, found the house, contacted it and out came a girl named Barbara. We told her we were missionaries and we began to talk. She was really nice and expressed to us that she had trouble believing in God but was always drawn back to Him and that she always wanted to believe in Him. She was so nice and receptive to us that I was a bit in shock!! We gave her a plan of salvation pamphlet and we will be going back over tonight to teach her!!! We are so excited!