Week 20

MY FAMILY:

Elder George, my brother, man you´re a good guy. I love you a lot. Your example, your letter, this last week really helped me as I just read it. What a missionary I have as a brother!!!!! YEAH!!! Way to get out there and get to work. The success you´re having is a testimony to me that the Lord has got his sleeves rolled up and is working right alongside you in your own misión. The best part is that he´s doing the exact same thing here in Paraguay, on the other side of the World. This week has actually been super tough for us. We were riding an awesome wave from this pool of investigators that we´d had from elder Swenson and I. We opened up with three baptisms this change, and the misión was just perfect. Well, the numbers are a juggling act. If you´re teaching tons of lessons every week, but you never have many new investigators, eventually you´re going to run dry. That´s what happened this week. After Olivia´s incredible baptism, our wave just died. Our solid investigators were baptized, and the others had completely stopped progressing. Haha. It was really really emotionally hard. A few days with next to no lessons just kills your spirit. Well, you know that old saying, when the going get tough, the tough get going? I sure didn´t feel very tough, but we decided that we should get going. :_).

So, lesson of the week? Do your contacts. I hadn´t been counting my contacts before in my misión, but we´re supposed to do at least 10 every day. It´s something that´s so simple, but for some reason so hard to follow. It´s a lot easier to just plan out your day, and then think that you´re too busy to stop and do a one minute contact along the way to your appointments. Haha, it sounds super selfish, and it is. But, want to know a secret? It´s actually a lot more fun! If your constantly looking people in the eyes, trying to find people who are selected of God, you don´t have time to think about yourself. AND, guess what else? God LOVES us. He´s just waiting for every posible chance he can find to dump blessings on us. Especially as missionaries. So, we started off by doing our contacts. We had faith that if we did our contacts, our number of new investigators Would go up. RESULT: We had more than double the number of new investigators this week than we had this whole change. We found a 16 year old kid named Sebastián who´s already gone to church and assisted the First presidency christmas rebroadcast with us, and has a bautismal date for the beginning of January. The misión president sets his vision of what he thinks our misión could be at, and I know he sets it with inspiration.

It´s a goal of mine to really try to get outside of myself, get lost, very very very lost in this work, and I can do it in contacts. I can think about how hot it is outside, or how humid it is outside, or how my pinkie toe hurts, or cualquier cosa. But when I think about the work, our investigators, what we´re going to be teaching, or how my companions doing, I´m happier. The day goes faster. My work is patterned more after the manner of the Lord.

Speaking of which… I´m always very interested in how hot it gets here, and what the humidity is. What if we make a deal. Can you tell me how hot it gets? I never know how to check. People say the signs in the street are always way off. Haha, and an investigator told me that on the TV they never post it as more than 40 celsius because it would make the people depressed. I thought that was pretty funny. Probably not true, but still funny. I guess we´ve had a TON of luck this year. Normally it starts getting hot in November, but the real heat didn´t start until 2 days ago. So it´s a great year!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Elder Stewart