Hi there fammy fam,
love you all. this week was a week of just hitting the pavement, and finding people. find, find, find. there is a huge difference in me as a missionary. from otuzco, where I was super terrified and shy, to here, where im really feeling more confident with just talking to everyone. its a change that is a huge miracle to me, I just love talking to people now. I feel like I mention a lot about miracles in my letters home. to me, miracles can be a lot of things. miracles to me are the small signs, tender mercies, that God is intricatley apart of our lives, and that He is doing his part. they are the marvelous works like in that scripture I shared, and truly it is hard to comprehend how many there are in a day.
an experience I want to share this week is about finding. Elder Mollo and I were walking the street, keeping our eyes peeled, our spirits open, on who we could talk with. The street we were on was dead, so I decided to look at the doors and see what door we could knock on. (normally we don't knock on doors here, we try to get references) this week was a little dry from the references, so in fact we had been knocking a lot on doors. its not recommended haha. its hard, but funny as well. I noticed a sign on one door that said they were renting out a room. I mentioned to my companion, "hey lets go pretend we are looking for a room to rent just so we can contact this person." he immediately agreed so we went. an older lady answered, and she took us up to this super small room (it was terrible), but we felt we could talk to her about the gospel. we told her we were missionaries from the church of Jesus Christ, and that we needed a slightly bigger room to do our studies. she replied, "I know who you guys are." we asked her how. she then relunctantly told us that she had been baptized in our church 40 years ago, and had been inactive because she had married a catholic. we were stunned. I looked at my companion, and immediately started telling her that we werent here by coincidence, that God was giving her an opportunity to return and listen to us. She declined us. I was super sad after that. I know it was a miracle to have found her, though it didnt even feel like a spiritual impression to knock on her door. God really gave her that chance, but she rejected it. I know she will have more in the future. I left that tiny room kind of astonished by how embedded, how personal, how intricately involved God is in our daily lives, even when we dont realize it. how marvelous his works are!
another thing this week. I probably have mentioned in the past one family we had been teaching, and the parents werent married. Giovanni and Harumy. well, they still arent married and didnt want to do so, so we had kind of dropped them for a week. friday night as an appointment fell, I felt the impression to go visit the family. we went apprehensively, not expecting much, but we were so so wrong. We got there, and the spirit was immediately there as we said a prayer and started talking. The mission is organizing a day so that there can be a lot of marriages. we invited them, again, to get married and they accepted. a miracle had happened. they knew that it was a commandment of God and they felt strongly about it now. I asked them why their answer was different, what had changed their mind. they told us that a family in the ward had invited them to come over for family home evening. they had had an amazing time to watch a family, grown in the gospel, share their testimonies, feel the love and unity in their home. I am grateful for that family, and how simple of an invitation it was to invite them to a simple event of family home evening. I hope we can all do that, and change lives, in a very simple, loving way.
love you all so much. it has been an amazing time in my mission here. i dont know if I will ever see that couple get married, or baptized, but I know they will, because the spirit had testified it to them. have a super good week, and keep the obeso leon family in your prayers.
LOVE YOU,
elder caldwell
pics: eating helado con mi amigo.
alleyway lurking.
ps: i had a dream that jeffrey r holland came to visit the mission and I took a selfie with him. we'll see if that is a prophesy. hahah
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