Faith and Prayer

Buenas tardes mi querida familia!

How are things going at the good old house?? I hope good, it sounds like it from your emails!

This week was interesting. We are going to baptize Itzel this Thursday, we are pretty excited about that. We prayed for a while to get permission from her mom and she finally gave it to her. We have so many experiences about prayer here in the mission field. Some big things, some little things. But there are two things that I know for sure about prayer. 1) God will always answer our prayers 2) He answers them in his own time. I have learned many times that if we pray for something we aren´t always going to receive an answer the next day. I used to think that faith was believing that I was going to receive, believing with everything i had that god was going to give me what I was asking for. But I have learned that Faith means that whatever answer we get to our prayers, whatever happens, we will act on that answer, and we will work just as hard or harder if nesecary to do all in our power to do what the Lord wants us to do.

We realized something that we haven´t been doing as much as we should be doing, so we are excited to try it this week. We were reading in Predicad mi evangelio and found a part where it says to invite people to be baptized the first time we vistit them. We realized that we had fallen in that a little bit. So we set a goal this week to do a baptism invitation with every person that we find this week, and we feel like its going to help us alot.

We had stake conference this week, and Presidente Treviño and his wife came and spoke to us, it was great. We talked to him afterwards about our area and what we are doing to have success and all that jazz. We told him that we were working as hard as possible but it has been kind of hard lately. He just smiled and told us that the area is a little bit tricky, but that it is meant to test us, try us, and there are lots of little tricks and techniques that we are going to learn from the area. But he was really happy that we are working hard and enjoying ourselves alot in this work. I feel like I´m going after this change, because he told us to work super hard before we see changes, and then told Elder Carmona, "except for you Elder, you won´t be seeing any changes" so we will see what happens.

We found this 80 year old man last week, suposedly he was baptized, but doesn´t remember receiving the holy ghost... sound like he just doesn´t remember but hes actually got a really good memory, you´d be surprised, but we are going to check in the computer on sunday to check. But he had stopped going to church for some reason forever ago, and had started going to a christain church by his house. But we told him that he needs to return and helped him realized again that this is the true church, and we invited him to come to stake conference with us. He told us super quick ya I´ll come, and we told him sweet we will pass by with a member in a car to bring you. He firmly told us that he would go solo, because he wanted to walk, (he told us he really, really likes to walk) We thought ok wow, hes totally lying to us, haha but he wouldn´t budge in his desicion. So we showed up to stake conference a little late because we had to pass by for a couple of people (none of them were home) and so we didn´t get to see who had shown up or not, because the front row was open and we sat there. But after the two hours, we went outside and there he was, looking happy as could be. He had left his house at 9 in the morning to get to the chapel by ten. And the chapel was different than ours, because of conference, so it is out of our area. But he still showed up, it made our day. He said he really enjoyed it.

On saturday we took the son of our mision leader with us for the morning to all of our lessons, that was super cool becuase he is super pumped to go on a mision and it was good for him to get an idea of missionary work. He is great, he is a really good example to us because we were talking to him about what he likes to do and stuff and he told us, I dunno, I just like to go to church. And he was dead serious too, I told him that the world could use more people like him.

We got a couple of new american misionaries in the zone. They are awesome, of couple of really really tall Elders from California and Utah. But it is funny to look at all the new misionaries come in, they are all super great, scared to death, and have tons and tons of questions, and think mexico´s like the craziest place ever. Its funny too to look at how much we have changed alreayd, how much i have changed. I dunno what it is, but you can just tell the ones who have been on the mission for a while and the ones who just got here in like a 5 minute conversation without asking how much time they have. I am so grateful for this chance that I have to let god mold me into who I´m gonna be for the rest of my life, I´m trying to let him do it without too much trouble, Im sure he gets frustrated with me at times but thats why we have the atonement right? :)

I love you all sooooo much!! tHanks for the prayers!! and emails!!

Elder Eastmond

Ps the fotos of the temple are some that our misson leader took of his sealing, he went over the weekend and borrowed the camerera! The other one is a giant bug :)