Elder Josh Burt: Yummy Thanksgiving Dinner

Querido Familia,

This week we started teaching two new families. One of them is the brother of Ivana and the other is the family of a friend of a member we have been teaching.

I don't know if I have talked about Juan Pablo before, but he is a friend of a member family (all of them are recent converts of a few months) and one day Sister Melba Tortarola, the mom, told us that their friend JuanP (pronounced like Wampi) watched their Joseph Smith video four times and was interested in the church. So we started teaching him at the member's home and he has been to church twice now; he missed last Sunday.

Just a few days ago, we ended up going to JuanP's house to teach him, instead of teaching him at Sister Melba's house. We figured it would be good to, at the very least, get to know his family before he got baptized into the church. So we met his mom and she was really nice and invited us in to have a discussion in her living room. We started talking to her and actually ended up teaching her the Plan of Salvation because she had a cousin who died recently as well as a daughter. The highest point of our lesson with her was when we told her that she will be able to not only see her daughter again, but live with her family for eternity. Tears filled her eyes and she just wanted us to talk forever (I think we too often forgot how much of a difference it makes in life to have the knowledge that we have compared to someone who has always lived thinking this life was the end).

So now, JuanP's mom, Beatrice, and his two brothers are all going to be baptized in December. The original plan was for the fifteenth, but now we're thinking it will be the twenty-second. The only thing we're missing now is their dad, whom we havn't had a chance to meet yet.

This other family that we're starting to teach is the brother of Ivana and the son of Margarita Guzman. His name is Omar and he lives with his wife and three kids. Two of his kids are old enough to be baptized and they're both more excited about baptism than Omar is. The reason for that though is because Omar has been inactive for years and doesn't feel like he is worthy or ready to go back to church, but when feelings like that come around there isn't a better time to go to church. His wife is pretty excited and attentive too (she'll be the first person I've ever helped get baptized that has a tattoo of a dagger going through a scorpion). Their thirteen year old daughter (who wasn't present during our first lesson with the family) actually asked us if she could get baptized before we invited her to be, so we're thinking that she is prepared and ready. At the end of the second lesson we had, we asked who wanted to pray and she immediately volunteered. We said we'd love to have her give the prayer and then she ran into the house and then came back out a moment later with a Catholic Saint prayer card. Her aunt, Maria (Ivana's sister), and dad hurried and explained that we don't pray like that, and then we explained prayer to her. I had to laugh to myself later because she used her Catholic prayer card to mark a page in Ether about faith. But it was a cool lesson we had with them because they were all marking their scriptures with higlighters and pencils as we read with them.

So from those two families, we have seven people who are basically already in the water and our just waiting for the font to fill up a little more.

Other than that, we're still teaching David who hit a rough patch after that time we found him drunk. It turns out that he has an ex-girlfriend in another city and he thought that she was waiting for him, but that turned out not to be the case. So, we talked to him about Faith and how part of having faith is knowing that our Heavenly Father always has the best of the best planned for us. Other than those few days, he is doing really well and learning a lot. We gave him a General Conference talk from President Uchtdorf titled, "You Matter To Him" and he really liked it and asked for another talk that he could read.

os amo,

Elder Burt

Our Zone Leaders, who live with us, both hit their year and a half mark, so they bought a kilo and a half of ice cream