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| Boxing with Elder Cerecedo |
On Saturday, we were trying to find a member who was on the records, but we've never met him before and we only had a two cross streets as a reference for his address. So after a little bit of searching, we found his house, but not him. So, we said that we'd come back another time to try to meet with him. So after a bit of searching, we found his house, but not him. when we went back, he was there, but was sleeping. So we started talking to his mom, Zulema, and it turns out that she also is a member, but she was baptized in a different province and she just didn't show up on our records. so we started talking to her for a while and she told us how she had been baptized in five churches, the fifth and last being ours. Naturally, we invited her to come back to church, but she was a little bit hesitant to say yes because she ran a kiosco (a little shop run from our home) and she couldn't leave unless her son would run the store for her. So we told her that she could just close the store on Sundays, but I don't think that she got the hint. We finally got a "maybe" from her because we had to eliminate every doubt she had and offer her a ride in a car with the branch president. In the end, she said that we could call her to see if she wanted to be picked up in the morning. So we called her son, Carlos, the next morning to see if she would like us to like us to come pick her up. Well, Carlos started saying a bunch of reasons why she wouldn't be able to go and ended the call. A few minutes later, however, we got a text that said that she wanted to come and was waiting for us. When we came in with her, the members we very excited to see her and one of the members, Brother Omar, was very content with us for having brought her.
We've been working with Lisandro, Milagros, and Ramon Avalos for a baptismal date of the thirteenth of July, but there is just one problem: they are minors and need parental permission to be baptized. So we've been trying to meet with the parents, but their step-dad won't even talk to and their mom is always working. We're actually going to go over there tonight to try to find their mom and talk to her. we've met with her once before and she already understands that we see our visits with them and their church attendance ending in baptism.
The other day while we were walking down the street, there was a drunk man who came up to us and started talking to us. Well, he really more of stumbled up to us as he was finding it difficult to walk in his current intoxicated condition. But he started talking to us and then asked if we could help him get back to his house. So we asked where he lived and it isn't far, but what happened is that I ended up carrying this guy back to his house. I was trying to talk to him the whole way about his family and what he does for work, but he would start talking and then would just go into gibberish. After stopping a couple times along the way, either to rest or to avoid cars going by, we got to his house and I helped him into the chair he had out front. We didn't want to stay too long however, because there really isn't too much that we can teach to a man when his mind is clouded in such a way, so we gave him a photo of Christ and wished him the best before heading off. As we left, he called out to us saying, "I love you my brothers!"
It's always interesting when drunk people want to talk to us. There was one man who kept talking and didn't seem to have an end in sight to his conversation, so I gave him a photo of Christ to distract him from his speech long enough to say that we had to move on, so to thank us for the picture he kissed each of our ties.This particular man always calls us, "his dear brothers," whenever we see him.
We've been really trying to focus on the Luke family, and we actually learned that Daniel, the husband, was going to be baptized, but couldn't quite get there because he couldn't quit smoking; and that his wife, Norma, wasn't really as serious about getting baptized as he was, and we've seen that to be true even now. Daniel has been keeping his commitments to read though, but there is always something that comes up that keeps them from going to church.
The other day, we taught them the ten commandments and then a couple days later when we went back to visit them, they asked if we could mark the page where the ten commandments where so that they could read them again later. So we were more than happy to help them along in their reading and the next time after that that we went to visit them, Daniel had gained some personal revelation. He was telling us about how he was thinking about the first and second commandments, "Thou shalt have one God and none other" and "Thou shalt have no grave images," and he had come to the realization that, "the saints (like the Virgin Mary and every other things like it) are pointless and don't make any sense."He then told us that he had before had a Gauchito Gil statue, but had since thrown it out. I'd call that progress, Even if they aren'
t coming to church for now, they, or at least Daniel, is coming closer and closer to Christ.
os amo,
Elder Burt
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