hello everyone. this was another amazing week here in villahermosa and i am learning a ton.
i am enjoying the last part of my mission. it is weird that it is coming to a close but to be honest it really doesnt feel like it at all. it seems normal, maybe it feels like i have transfers or something like that, but it doesnt feel like im going to be going home and stop being a full time missionary. i think on the airplane home it will hit maybe. we have been working super hard here and seeing a lot of miracles.
yesterday i had a really cool experience. we went to a few different appointments yesterday and we found ourselves in two of them with people form other churches that just wanted to argue. i always hate those appointments. i used to get mad and open up my bible and show them everything, but now ive learned not to do that and i stay calm and try to help them to understand the key to our message. usually they dont listen, and we leave. we are here to call those that are prepared to repentance.
anyways, yesterday we were hoping to have a huge attendance at church for ward conference. we made invitations and went around to lots of members and less active people inviting them and telling them to bring their friends and family. we didnt meet our goal and it was a little disappointing. after that we had these appointments, and it was sorta a harder day, especially because the family perez didnt come to church. they had a date to get baptized. i didnt get discouraged, but i wasnt full of energy maybe ha. when we got home at night my companion said the prayer to start planning and while he said the prayer i started receiving a lot of impressions. when he finished praying i started thinking out loud saying all the things that were coming. i was reflecting on those lessons and what we did wrong, and what those ppl did wrong, and what is our purpose here. i felt a few things. one, we need to be humble and understand who we really are. we are children of god, not god, we as moses said coming out of the vision where he saw all gods creations "i know that man is nothing". we cannot begin to comprehend the smallest fraction of what god can. we need to understand that, and learn to not try and do everything ourselves, but to trust in him. 2, i learned that we need to have faith. but real faith. faith to move mountains, or like nephi, faith to dry the sea if god commanded it. sometimes when the hardest more difficult problems come, we think "theres no room for errors, i cant chance it on faith, i need to do it myself", when really the solution is, trust in god. 3, i learned that we need to work and be diligent. doing everything we can to complete with the first two points and all the commandments, basically be obedient. i felt like i hadnt done all those things as well as i could have. that i had trusted too much in my own knowledge and not in miracles of god. as i said all these things, i literally felt my faith growing. i know that god works miracles.
that night we went to sleep and at 11:30 i woke up. i looked at the phone and read a message that had just come in. it was from Hno Perez, it said "God just answered my question. what you told me would happen, happened." the day before i had invited him and his wife to go into their room alone, read a little from the book of mormon, and then say a prayer out loud asking if it is all true. they did it. I yelled at my companion to wake up and threw the phone to him. we have been fasting almost every week for them and our investigators and i know that god answered our humble prayers in answering that prayer of faith of Hno perez.
i know that this is the true church. if we pray and ask god we can know all things by the holy ghost.
love you and miss you
elder smith
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