Week Before Christmas

Hola!

Another week has passed again. I can´t even believe it most of the time. It seems unreal most of the time. The days are super fast but the months are kind of slow. It is a really weird paradim I live in. But things are really different here in the middle of the earth at the equator. One thing that has not changed it that every day it gets hotter and hotter. At night it is now 85 degrees when I wake up and and when I go to sleep. It is miserable some nights but I am so glad that I am a sleeping bear and can sleep through anything because I litterly do.

This week I am still in 1st Nephi. But I am loving reading it again. I am spending more time with looking up who people are and using more of the cross references to the Bible. This week I learned more about Zedekiah and the destruction of Jersalem. I am also reading in the Old Testiment. Did you know that the story of Noah and the Arc is litterly only 2 chapters in the Old Testiment. And the reason that Noah built the ark is because there were so many wicked people on the earth that the Lord flooded the earth and only Noah and his family and 2 of every kind of animal was left. I love the Bible and am falling more in love with the Book of Mormon each time I read it.

I also found a new definition for Faith this week, COURAGE. We have to have courage to live not like the world but like Christ. We have to have courage to live the commandments of the Gospel. We have to have courage to avoid the temptations of the devil. Courage is what we need to be a person who wants to change and follow the Savior. Nephi needed courage to return to Jersalem and get the Brass plates which we now have in the Book of Mormon. Faith is courage. 

This week has been hard with finding people to teach but we try harder each and every day. We had a baptism scheduled for this weekend but they decided to not get baptized because they didn´t like waking up for church each weekend. It was sad and my heart wanted to brake but I know that we all have the gift of agency on this earth and they have the right to use it. 

I had a really spiritual experience this week when we were contacting. A few days ago we were walking down the street and this little girl (who was born on the same day as Luis) stuck out her hand and wanted to give me a piece of paper because she said I was her friend. Her name is Isabella and she just turned 6. A few days later we were contacting on the same street and she came to the window again and called us over. Her mother was in the living room and they were preparing for Isabella´s birthday party on Saturday. We asked if we could help, but the mother politely said no. So we talked to her for an hour through her window. She had a Book of Mormon already and had meet with the missionaries before. I could see it in her eyes that she was sad. 

We taught her about Eternal Families and a little about the restoration because she wanted to know more about Joseph Smith. I asked her to follow the example of Christ and be baptized and she said I can´t because I am not married to my husband. But I had such a strong impression that I needed to ask. We asked her to talk with her husband and make a goal to get married civially here in Guayaquil. She also accepted the phamplets we had and said she would read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. She also asked during our conversation why prophets in the Bible never wrote about Joseph Smith. I got an impression to relate what happened to Jesus Christ to why prophets do not reveal who the next prophet will be. I told her of how when Jesus Christ was born, prophets had written abou the signs. That a bright star would shine and on that night Christ would be born. The good people looked for the star and waited, the bad people looked for the star and wanted to kill the baby Jesus because they knew of the good he would bring. I related this to the fact that prophets have never said the next prophet will be... in the Bible and this is because it is through God that the prophets recieve inspiration on who the next prophet will be. And God needs to protect his messangers. I talked to her about this for 5 minutes and it was nothing that I had practiced or even knew how to say before. It was such a great experience.

There is so much work to do here in Alegria. I am so grateful for this time in my life. The Lord blesses me daily with the ability to speak in Spanish and blesses me when I speak. 

Love, AnnaAlicia