Week 41 - Asuncion Paraguay - Villa Hayes

Hola Familia! 

Thank you so much for your prayers this week. Seriously, I felt your support even before I got to read your e-mails this week. Thank you Grandma, Dad, Mom, and Goompa and Nana for your letters. I´m glad to hear that everything is going well for you.

Congratulations Andrew! I´m so glad that you are now officially a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! Did you get the letter I sent you? I hope you did.

I can´t believe that it´s week 41 already. This means that I´m now half-way done with my mission. That is so sad. The year has absolutely flown by. I´ve seriously come so far. Spanish is almost never a problem anymore, unless someone mumbles or intentionally talks too fast. I´ve seen TWO of the three Conferences I´ll see in Paraguay, and have now had two of the three temple trips. It´s so sad. 

The temple was amazing this week. We got to go on Friday, and were looking forward to it all week. For good reason. It was a perfectly tranquil day. With the extra studies we do as trainer and trainee, and with how slow the buses are, we did no actual proselyting at all that day. It was like a mini vacation. :) We got to go to the Distribution Center before our session started (I used my debit card--I think all the super cheap stuff I bought came to like $10), and then had a dinner with two zones´ worth of missionaries at the oh-so-elegant Burger King (I...also used my debit card there.) It was all really fun to reconnect with the other missionaries and just enjoy ourselves. 

But the best part of course was the temple itself. Walking through those doors was like stepping straight into heaven. Instantly all of the noise and smells and stress of Paraguay was snuffed out, and we were enveloped by a warm feeling of peace and calm. Everything was so beautiful. We got to do confirmations, initiatories, and an endowment session. Before, I went to the temple so often that the words became kind of old to me and I didn´t appreciate them as much. But after not having set foot in a temple for six whole months, I appreciated it all so much. It was like doing it all for the first time again. My memories were refreshed of the covenants I´ve made with God and the promises I´ve received from Him. Being able to pray in the Celestial room without worrying about the time or what my companion was doing or if someone was gonna interrupt me was so refreshing. I didn´t want the tranquility to end. None of us did. We could have stayed there all week had we been allowed.

So to all you Utahns who are now going on, what, 17 temples? I hope you go a lot and count the blessings you have in being able to do so. I´m so glad that Paraguay at least has a temple, and that I´m able to go every six months. But it will be awesome to be able to go every week again someday.

This week we actually found quite a few people who believe in the Church and want to be baptized. It was amazing to really see how many people there are who recognize the Truth and are ready to follow it. They´re few, but they´re so valiant. The only problem is, EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has someone keeping them from being baptized. Either they don´t have permission from their parents, or their spouse doesn´t want them to join. It´s so sad. We heard that FOUR times this week. Four! There´s one in particular named Sol who´s only 13 and is literally counting down the days until she turns 18 and can be baptized without her parents´ permission. Every time we see her, she´s out back reading the Doctrine and Covenants or working on Personal Progress. She´s seriously the most golden investigator I´ve ever met. We dedicated our fast this Sunday to her--to soften the hearts of her parents. As she always says, "God never gives a commandment unless we can do it." She has faith that she will be able to get baptized someday, she´s just afraid that she doesn´t have sufficient faith or something and that God will someday chastise her for not getting baptized before 18. We read with her in the Book of Mormon about Limhi´s people who weren´t able to get baptized because they didn´t have the authority, and assured her that sometimes we really do just have to trust in the Lord´s time and the Lord´s ways. 

We didn´t have much success in getting people to come to church with us on Sunday. And by "much success," I mean "no success" when it comes to investigators. Not a single one. BUT we did manage to get three inactive members to come with us, which made me so happy. I know that we´re supposed to focus on getting people into the waters of baptism, but honestly, getting people to re-enter the doors of the chapel is almost as rewarding. One of them was a man named Felipe who was depressed and heartbroken when a faithful, endowed woman in the church turned down his marriage proposal. When we visited him on Saturday he was determined not to go to church, not wanting to have to face her. He´s such an amazing, faithful member, though, that I would not leave that house until I´d gotten him to change his mind. I bore testimony that going to church is EXACTLY what we need to do when we´re sad, especially when it seems hardest--that Satan wants him to put off facing the woman perpetually. I expressed my fear that he would never go to church again if he didn´t face his fear and go this Sunday. He was pretty stubborn, until I gave the closing prayer, asking God to strengthen him. When I opened my eyes again, he was silently crying. He said he was going to study the scriptures and pray, because he knew he shouldn´t sin against the truth of church-going but confide in God´s love. He didn´t show up for the first hour of church and I was certain that he had flaked out. But then he was there for Sunday School, and at sacrament meeting he was talking with the woman he´d proposed to again. I´m sure his pain will still be there, but at least he´s making steps towards healing instead of wallowing in self-pity as Satan so often encourages us to do.

Anyways, church was really great yesterday. We had a grand total of 38 people there, and I´m pretty sure every single person bore their testimony in testimony meeting. They HAD to, to fill the time. The branch president practically begged them at the beginning to all be brave and share. It was so amazing to hear all of their stories of conversion. I´m sure they´ve heard each others stories loads of times, but for me it was so inspiring. I bore my testimony too, which I usually don´t do so that others can have a chance. It felt good. I don´t know why I´ve always been so scared to do that in the past. 

After church, we received word from the Elders in our neighbor city of Benjamin, that a girl who lives in Villa Hayes attended there with her boyfriend, loved the message of the Restoration, and wants to get baptized. After all of our hard work, finding almost no success with investigators, we just might see a miracle and have a baptism this month after all! I talked with the girl on the phone (her name is Fabiola) and she really does seem very interested. Yay for member boyfriends/girlfriends! Never forget the power of a good example. I just hope she really does go all the way. We´ve had so many false alarms lately.

Let´s see...what else happened this week... Oh! So our branch president, Presidente Rojas, is a VERY humble man. He has seven amazing kids--his oldest has served a mission and his second-oldest is filling out her papers right now. Every time we go to his house he´s diligently working. He has a very humble job of making woolen horse blankets by hand. He buys lots wool, washes it in the river, hangs it on his fence to dry, then (all by hand) spins it into yarn and weaves it. He does it all so quickly and is literally always working on it, that when we asked how many he makes a day, we were expecting some great number. Instead we learned that he can only make two or three. So on Thursday, after we had lunch with the Rojas family, we did some service by helping him for an hour. It was like being in pioneer times again. I´m pretty sure I´ve done that same thing at the "This is the Place" park. We used wooden paddles with barbs (like big dog brushes) to fluff out the wool, then spun it using an ancient, foot-powered spinning wheel, and then wove it on a simple loom. We were very slow at it, compared to Pte. Rojas´ skills, but I think it did help him a lot to be able to do the spinning while we worked on the fluffing and weaving or whatever. It was fun, too. I think we´re gonna start making that a weekly tradition.

Random question: Did you all buy that "Men of MoTab" CD for Father´s Day this year? Hna. deVries has it, and we listened to it on our new DVD player (one of the awesome perks of being a trainer) and I love it so much!! Men´s choirs are amazing, and MoTab especially. I´m gonna be sad when Hna. deVries leaves me and I don´t have that CD on my iPod anymore. 

Oh, and just some clarification: Hna. Rivera was crying when we got Changes because she didn´t want to leave Villa Hayes. Ypacarai is awesome, but Villa Hayes is the only area she´s known, so she was really sad to have to leave. But I hear she´s doing great now. 

Well, that´s all for this week. Thank you again for all of your support. I´m doing really well, and so is Hna. deVries. She´s almost used to Paraguay and the very taxing schedule, and so far we´ve had zero problems together. She´s a great hard worker and she loves the gospel. It´s been a lot of trial-and-error together, but we work together well and have improved a lot as a companionship.

I hope you´re all doing well and that you have an awesome week. I love you!

---Hna. Springer

Here are more pictures! Yay!

1-Me with Hna. Devries and the Madariagas.
2-Some awesome Villa Hayes scenery
3-Blackberries!
4-Our old Villa Hayes district (two of them went home)