Sounds like you´re all doing well and having a fun month of March. Thank you Grandma Springer, Dad, Mom, Sarah, Ashley, and Laurel for your letters. I love you all so much and getting e-mails from you on Mondays is definitely a highlight of the week.
Dad, I was going to send you a picture of the map of our area so you can pinpoint where you are but I´ve reached the limit on the pictures I can attach to this e-mail so I´ll try to explain it again. My area is north of Asunción, west of the airport, and east of the big road in Mariano Roque Alonso. I don´t really know how to explain where our house is. Eh. I´ll send you a picture next week. Sorry. :) Also, there are six of us missionaries here in Mariano, and there are two other sisters in our zone. One of them is Hna. Messina, who was in my BYU ward last year. Small world, right?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMANDA!! Sounds like you´ve been showered with love and gifts lately. And Happy Birthday Grandma Springer! I hope you have something fun planned!
Is everyone excited for conference? I so am! I can´t decide if I want to watch it in English with the other missionaries or in Spanish with our investigators. I really want to get as much out of conference as I can this year, because I really need the council of prophet as I try to bring others to the truth. But at the same time, I want to watch the investigators´ faces as they hear from a living prophet for the first time. I love telling them about Thomas S. Monson and bearing my testimony about their divine calling. It´s an amazing thing.
I´m also really excited for conference weekend because we missionaries get to go to the temple in Asunción the Friday before! I´m so so so excited. I didn´t think they had clothing rental there but apparently they do. At least, for the missionaries. It doesn´t have a visitor´s center though. I think someone asked me about that a while ago. Lots of people in Paraguay know about the temple, though. They think it´s gorgeous. And it is, especially for a really poor country like this one.
So I have a couple of funny stories to tell you that happened this week.
Story number one: The other day we were talking with these women with this young member boy with us. As we were talking, I felt something on my leg. I flicked it off and found that it was a gecko. I thought it was so cute and I didn´t want it to get squished by everyone walking around. At home, I would just pick it up, but here I´m forbidden to touch any animal because the vast majority are disease-ridden. So I just pointed it out. The women we were talking to immediately started freaking out. Apparently they´re both terrified of geckos. Everyone was shrieking and moving away from it, and then the member boy, Martin, just went up and stamped on it. There was a stunned silence. Even the women afraid of geckos were mortified. It was hilarious.
Story number two: Hna. Stagg and I encountered a man the other day who had once investigated the church and had read the Book of Mormon and testified that it was all true. He was an older man and he´d had tons of time to think about it, but he said he absolutely would not get baptized, and he definitely would never come to church with us. When we asked him why not, he said it was because we were Americans. We pretended to be all offended, asking if he was racist, and he said no, but he knew that we were government spies and so he wasn´t going to have anything to do with us. I´d heard that lots of Paraguayans think the missionaries are spies in disguise but this was the first I´d actually seen for myself. I had a hard time not cracking up.
Story number three: the day after we encountered the man who thought we were spies, we were walking to an appointment when an elderly lady stopped us in the street. She asked us what congregation we were from. We told her. She said that she wanted us to pray for her. We said of course we would, what did she want us to pray about ? She said she wasn´t going to tell us; that she was angry at the Virgin and so if we prayed for her and she got the miracle she was looking for, she would join our congregation without question. We gave her directions to the church and expect to see her real soon. :)
Last night we had Noche de Hogar with a really, really sweet inactive family, whose daughter is one of those girls about to get baptized. It went really well--they made us Paraguayan-style pizza, we taught the father how to conduct a typical Family Night and we missionaries shared a spiritual thought about prayer. The Catholic grandma was there, too, and it was a great opportunity to share the gospel and put her at ease about the Mormon spy missionaries. But then the father whipped out Jesus the Christ and started reading about how Christ taught in parables, which was great, but then he started arguing with the grandma, his mother-in-law, that we should always teach in parables. She argued that it depended on the person being taught. They both wanted Hna. Stagg and me to agree with one or the other. When we finally put a stop to that, the grandma volunteered to give the prayer. She agreed to say it the way we Latter-Day Saints say it, but she started off by saying, "Forgive me, Lord, for not praying the correct way, using The Lord´s Prayer..." Other than that, it was a perfectly sincere prayer. I gave her a Book of Mormon afterwards and we´ll see what happens with her. She´s a nice lady when she´s not Bible-bashing with her son-in-law.
We have several really great investigators right now, but it is SO HARD to get any of them to come to church with us. We had six of them sincerely promise us they would come to church. They went on and on about how much they wanted to know the truth and how they wanted to get to know the people better...then only one showed up yesterday. Hna. Stagg and I were so disappointed. Our necks hurt from looking behind us so much during the meetings, expecting someone to walk through the door. The man who showed up is named Teodocio. He´s been investigating the church for a while and he´s a really great man. Unfortunately, he doesn´t have much faith. He wants a miracle BEFORE he takes a leap of faith and is baptized. Last week he wanted the miracle to be a better job. This week he was whining about how he doesn´t have a wife. Finally we just cracked down on him and told him that the Spirit would be his constant companion, and he asked, "So when can I get baptized?" Yay. But now we have to wait until after conference if he wants to be confirmed the day after baptism because we have district conference next week. We´ll see how it goes, though. At this rate we should have at least three baptisms in April.
The ward is really stellar. We have about 100 people in attendance every week. Unfortunately, they are really, really bad about strengthening each other and the less active members. Visiting and home teaching is pretty much nonexistent. We can´t rely on any of them to do any fellowshipping for us. We´re pretty much the only ones who do any of that around here. I know that as missionaries our main priority is to find new people to teach, but I´m afraid that until we clean the inner vessel, we´re not going to have much success with the outer vessel. We´re not sure what to do to reanimate the ward and make people WANT to go to church.
The Second Coming feels really close here, especially after the Japan disaster. We´re having a lot of people talk to us, sometimes because they get really excited about the "Latter-Days" part. Almost every investigator we have right now has asked us what the Apocalypse is going to be like. People recognize the hand of God here. They´re all really religious or at least superstitious. But very few of them are actually willing to change their ways. It´s like the Liahona or the Brass Serpant. I just want to scream sometimes, "JUST HAVE FAITH AND LOOK!!" They just have to look to the Lord. People believe in the Lord but they don´t think they need to do anything more than read a verse or two in the Bible every so often and say "Padre Nuestro" every night. And of course the Catholics have the problem of praying to saints... It´s just difficult to get them to open their eyes, but we´ve found a few who really have done just that and are really excited to learn. I LOVE talking to them, and I´m so sad that none of them have gone to church yet.
There´s a man in the ward, inactive of course, named Fulgencio who has an empeñada stand (it´s like a South American-flavored potsticker). We talk to him a lot about the state of the world, and he always asks about what life is like in the States. When we tell him, he always comments on how great people we and our families must be to be so blessed. We are SO BLESSED. I hope you all realize that. I don´t feel like I´ve done much to deserve all the blessings I´ve been given throughout my life, but it´s true I´ve had a ridiculous abundance of them. Count your blessings, everyone. Seriously. You don´t know how great you have it until it´s gone.
My favorite person to teach right now is a man named Elber, who I mentioned in my first letter (the one who was excited to learn that God and Christ are separate people). He´s hard to find because he works so much, but every time we see him he grins and stops what he´s doing to talk to us. He says "mi casa es su casa" every time, and always loves to learn from the Book of Mormon. He didn´t come to church either, and his face was the one I wanted to see the absolute most. But he´s a great, great person, and I know he´s going to go far. Plus he´s married to the woman he lives with, which is a rarety here in Paraguay and means that he´s a prime candidate for an unhindered baptism. Hna. Stagg says that he´s the most promising investigator she´s ever encountered in Paraguay--always friendly and always excited to learn more about how he can help his family. Anyways, when we talked to him on Saturday, we were disappointed to hear that he hadn´t been reading in the Book of Mormon. But then he told us why: the day we gave it to him, his brother-in-law saw it on his table and said, "Can I have that book?" Elber said, "No, it´s mine." "I will PAY you for that book." "I can´t sell it to you, it was a gift!" Apparently the brother-in-law has always, ALWAYS wanted to read the Book of Mormon, but he never managed to find a copy. Elber lent it to him, and from what we´ve heard he´s eating it up. I´m so excited for them both. Now we just need to make sure that they both have copies so they can both progress together.
Well, I´m out of time. Be safe, have fun, read the scriptures and rely on the Lord for everything!! Love you!!
--Hna. Springer
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