so this week has been pretty slow. good but slow. we´ve been working with marcus a lot but cant get him to come to church. its quite frustrating but oh well. he and tene are ready for baptism and want to be baptized but each have their own little things.
we have officially dropped our golden family of 5 because of some difficult curcumstances they have with getting married and having work only on sundays making church impossible to get to without completely changing jobs which he´s not willing to do. ...can´t imagine why... and nobody in the ward wants the responsibility of hauling the kids to church each week so its pointless to baptize them if they aren´t going to attend church. missionary work is a collaboration of efforts. the missionaries can´t do everything themselves. it takes effort from the bishop (which we still dont have) and the ward. the ward is key and our ward is not helping us out. so we´re trying to figure out what to do about that. so we have been contacting a lot trying to get some new investigators but to no avail quite yet. we just have to keep our faith alive and keep looking for those who have been prepared to receive us.
Elder Castellanos had a cool experience the other day when we did divisions with the area Bosque where he was walking with elder Mendoza and a lady came running up to them in a frantic manner and stopped them and asked them who christ was and then a couple other questions then said the reason she was seeking them was because she was in her house and heard a voice say ¨salte, y busca un hombre vestido en blanco y azul¨ which translates to ¨get yourself out (in command form) and search for a man dressed in white and blue¨ so thats what she did. they were both wearing white shirts (obvious) and blue pants. so that was pretty interesting. too bad she´s not in our area, but ya.
at the same time that happened to him i was with elder Higgenbotham (haha) and a drunk guy pulled up to us in his car and poured out his soul about how he needed to talk to us and get closer to god and change his life. this is actually pretty common. drunk people are pretty emotional and when they see that we´re religious representitives they like to do that. so i taught him about the gospel of jesus christ and repentance and stuff and was pretty direct with him because i knew from past experience with these dudes that most of it is just talk. I basically told him directly but as loving as possible: if you really want to change the first step is to quit drinking. pray for help and repent yourself. then explalined about how christ can help us through anything.i could tell he felt like crap. usually missionaries just say like oh, well have faith, repent, blah blah blah, and are all nice about it but i can tell i cut him to the core by straight up calling him out on his problem. its much more effective if you dont dance around it. hopefully he remembers that and decides to change but i´ll never know. i just need to say, i wasn´t mean, just direct. so ya, it wasn´t super exciting but its a story.
thats about the extent of my stories this week. a bit dry but yesterday in church Adrian, the kid i baptized last week bore his testimony in church! during the listening of which i learned that he has a long way to travel to get to the pachecos house so that he can go to church. by bus about 2 hours and a lot of times he doesn´t have any money so he walks. the entire way. he gets up at about 5 am, gets ready, and walks arriving just in time to leave for church. i was blown away. i felt so guilty for all those times i didnt feel like getting up bright and early at 8:00, getting ready in my fancy house, hopping in my fancy car, and driving a whopping 5 minutes or less to church. (note the sarcasm). so probly for the rest of my life if im ever feeling like its too hard to go to church i´ll just think of Adrian. that should get me motivated.
alright well im out of time but i miss you all and hope everything is great. like always :) have a great week! I love you all!
love,
Elder Henze
P.S.- there´s definitely a drunk dude at the computer next to me singing. i wish you could hear this... haha!
Some examples of transportation options in Oaxaca :)
