Week 102: I believe in Miracles!!

Buenos Dias a Todos!!

This week was a good week of some miracle moments and also a long week of lots of walking ha ha. I am super super super tired physically, mentally, and emotionally, but I gotta work in the time which is called "Day" (D&C).

Basically the best part of the week was a day of Interchanges when I was in another sector with one of the elders of my zone.

I was with Elder "R" the Brazilian who was with me in the trio to start the change. We were in his sector and it was a day of Miracles. To start it all the night before I started preparing myself for the interchange with prayers and studies to prepare us to have a day of miracles. I made sure to have true intent and offered my whole self and energy and everything as an offering to have miracles happen. When the interchange came we made sure to work as hard as we could and we saw the results of our prayer.

We contacted EVERY PERSON that we could reach. In the whole day I think we contacted 25 or 26 people. We taught 3 investigators in 1 day, found 2 new investigators, and invited 2 people to be baptized in the lesson.

We contacted a 17 year old named Ian. The whole day I was making it my goal to contact people in different ways. As he was walking up I saw his shoes and thought they were cool so I decided to start the contact with that.

"Hey cool shoes man!" It sounded like one of the cheesiest contact starts ever. But we kept talking and started talking about God. He told us that he had heard  about God but hadn't really seen his existence in his life and was indifferent because of that. We both testified about our experiences coming to know if God existed and the spirit was really strong. He was super interested, accepted a book, and almost begged us to come to his house. It was really a miracle to be able to contact someone like that. The whole day we were laughing that our best contact of the day started with "Hey cool shoes man!"

In the interchange I really wanted to be a great example because Elder "R" is relatively new and has a ton of potential to be a great leader and great missionary. So I wanted to have every person that we contacted at least talk to us a little bit. As we tried to contact 2 teenagers that were walking by they were talking and hard core ignoring us. I was kinda desperate trying to get them to talk to us and was getting kind of frustrated. That's when I saw that one of them had a pack of cookies and that they were both kind of fliete. So loosing my tone of respect I pulled our my fliete and said "Hey kid, can I have a cookie" (It doesn't sound as fliete in English). They were both so shocked that they stopped walking, opened the pack of cookies and gave me one. I couldn't believe that it worked to get his attention and that he actually gave me a cookie! I tried to share the gospel with them but they still didn't want anything. But at least they stopped and gave me a cookie!

All in all it was an incredible interchange and we really took out the trash! :)

But after the good times always come the tough ones. In my own sector we had a Murphy's law day.

We had worked all morning without having a successful contact or finding anyone who was interested. As we went to lunch our lunch called us saying that they wouldn't be ready until 3:30 which was late but still withing our schedule because we had an appointment at 4:30. Then as we were walking to lunch he called and said he wouldn't be ready until 4 or 4:15 ish. So we just cancelled lunch with him because we couldn't go that late. Then we started walking towards the appointment and we called to make sure that everything was okay because a member was going to go with us. But the appointment canceled. We were pretty hungry and frustrated so we decided to call our other investigator who was going to come back from Santiago and when she answered she said that she wasn't going to get home until Sunday night and wasn't going to come to church. We were so tired and frustrated after that that we decide to go buy completos for lunch. We walked for 25 minutes to get to the nearest completo store and when we got there.... That's right... It was closed! At that point we died and had no desire to keep going with anything. In the end we went and did service with our convert who then gave us completos. It was a long day but we kept persevering and got a couple lessons in.

All in all this week has been a really tough mental and physical week. But we will keep working hard and trucking on.

We just need your prayers because the kid that got baptized still hasn't gotten confirmed. His mom has changed all of a sudden and doesn't want to support him or receive visits from us any more. It was a drastic change and we still don't know why but we need all the prayers that we can get so that he gets confirmed.

But that was basically the week!

Love you all! Stay Golden!

Love,
Elder Nielson :)