11-30-09

Here are some excerpts from Brian's e-mail this week:

I am doing very, very well. It was great to hear about Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving was great, I actually forgot it was Thanksgiving, but I realized the day after. We just worked hard on Thursday, it was good.

Mom, in the package, can you send me a roll of black thread? I have done lots of sewing and used all of mine. I sewed up some tears near the pockets of my pants, my scripture case, and put on some buttons that fell off! Impressive, I know.

This week went by so fast. One notable event this week was that we had intercambios (in English, we say exchanges) - when we switch companions for a day. I have gone to other sectors before, three times, but this time I was in my sector with an elder (Elder Seager) from another sector. It was a cool experience. Elder Seager and I worked so hard all day and he and I taught some great lessons. I called people on the phone to see how they were doing and set up appointments. And I had never done that before. It went so well, I had to ask them to repeat things of course, but I set up three appointments that night.

And now for the comical moment of the week. Elder Reeder and I knocked on a door two days ago and a well-dressed older hispanic man answered the door. He opened the door and to our surprise said, ¨Hello, I learned English the same way that you are learning Spanish.¨ So Elder Reeder asked him if he had served a mission. He didn’t respond to this question. He proceeded to tell us that he was from Canada. We introduced ourselves in Spanish, and then went on to tell him how we were missionaries. We shared a brief testimony of Jesus Christ with him, and then we asked him if we could share more with him. And he responded something like this, ¨No. I don´t like you and your church. You two work for the CIA. And your church does too!” We thought he was joking, and we laughed. But he got mad. He was serious. He said,¨ Your church gets names and addresses for the CIA. You don´t see young men your age from Chile in the United States going door to door! (We tried to tell him that there were plenty of foreign missionaries in the States but he wouldn´t listen, he just kept going.) He was like, ¨You and your church go door to door and work for the CIA. It is people like you that made me come here and have to leave my country!¨ We told him that we were not from the CIA and really wanted to share a message with him about Jesus Christ, but he swore in English and slammed the door. It was hard not to smile when he was seriously telling us that we were from the CIA. It was so funny. We really did want to help him and share something special with him. But he was convinced we were lying to him. His English was pretty good, you could tell he hadn´t spoken it in a while, but it was still great. He sounded like someone from the US, he used words like ¨yeah man, guys, whatever.¨ I just wonder why he had to leave his country.

Luisa is doing so well. She wants to get baptized, but she has some things she has to resolve first. We are working with her, and asking her to pray about it. Please keep her in your prayers. She is such an amazing person, and she just loves the church. She knows that the Book of Mormon is true because she feels it in her heart when she reads it. She told us she has felt and found so many answers to things in life that she has been searching for, all in the Book of Mormon. She really has a true desire to get baptized, because she knows that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and that God restored the church of Jesus Christ back to the earth through Joseph Smith.