Dear Family,
Sorry I don´t have much to talk about this week, and I didn´t take a single picture this week. How boring, right? :) Once again, my thoughts are probably going to be a little jumbled.
Things are going pretty well here in Villa Hayes. The ward has been doing most of their visits to menos activos, and tonight we´re going to have an FHE with a few families to hopefully strengthen their friendships and get them to feel the Spirit more. I´m pretty excited.
Cleto´s doing very well. The next time we visited him after his baptism, he made a comment about how he could feel the power of the "strong prayer." AKA, his confirmation. He says he feels so much happier and stronger now, and just like what happened with Hna. Sanchez in Mariano, he FEELS like a member, now. I´m really happy for him. He´s going back to the chaco in a few weeks, but until then, he´s busily telling all of his visitors about the gospel and the Book of Mormon. Que calidad. :) It´s led to some pretty fun lessons . He tends to have random preachers from the chaco staying at his house.
Rubén is doing very well. He didn´t come to church yesterday (we haven´t found him yet to figure out why), but we visited him a lot this last week and he´s been LOVING reading the Book of Mormon. He read 1 Nephi 11 and totally drew from it similar insights and favorite scriptures that I´ve always enjoyed. We also gave him Alma 32 to read for homework, and he came away from it with such a deeper understanding of faith. He said, "Alma must have changed a lot of lives. His writings are wonderful." I agree! And it makes me so happy to see in little ways how Rubén really believes that real prophets wrote the Book of Mormon. He´s so smart about it all. It´s always a joy to visit and see what new questions and insights he has. Because he´s been doing so well, we got permission to baptize him with only two church attendances instead of three. So we could possibly have his baptism before the end of the month (when I may or may not be changed out of Villa Hayes)! I so hope it all works out that way. After he didn´t come to church yesterday, I´m a little worried.
My own scripture study has been going well. I FINALLY finished reading the whole Bible in Spanish. I can´t even remember when I started with that goal. It was a long time ago. But I really enjoyed it, and I feel like I have such a better understanding of why people interpret the Bible the way they do around here. I´m also able to use the Bible more in our lessons, showing the people that we DO believe in it, and I HAVE studied both.
I´m also starting to re-read Preach My Gospel. I should have been doing that my whole mission but somehow I got out of the habit and forgot that I´m supposed to read it every day. My first day re-reading it, I found a sentence that said that as our knowledge of the Atonement grows, our desires to share the gospel will increase. It was an answer to my prayers! I haven´t been wanting to not share the gospel, per se, but I have been struggling to really WANT to go outside and sweat all day in the summer heat. So I´d been praying for a source of strength, and now I´ve found it. I´ve been studying scriptures about the Atonement every day ever since, and it really is helping a lot.
The heat is really unbearable, though. Paraguayans think we´re so crazy for being outside in the afternoons. Even crazier than when we go out in the pouring rain. They always ask, "What are you doing walking around with this heat??" I´m always tempted to answer, "We´re working hard now so that we can avoid going to the place where the heat never ends." :) We´ve had lots of lightning shows and seen plenty of rain clouds, but somehow the rain always manages to just barely go around Villa Hayes. How lucky are we?
Anyways, I´m also working harder in studying Spanish. I´d re-read the book I got at the MTC so many times that I figured I didn´t need to read it anymore. Then I dabbled in Guaraní for a bit... Now I´m back to studying the Spanish book. I received extra motivation after Thursday. The daughter of our branch president asked me to give her a little piano lesson while lunch was cooking (they have a cheap little keyboard). She´d figured out how to pluck out one song, but it was in the completely wrong key, and it was obvious that she hadn´t actually read the book she was using at all. The book is a simple and short one, written by a returned sister missionary. I started her lesson at the very beginning of the book, helping her to learn the notes and the scales and things, and her understanding increased so much. I just wanted to ask, "Why didn´t you just read the book? It´s so easy!" Then I realized that I´ve been kind of neglecting to just read the books that I´ve been given, too. All those activities in Preach My Gospel and the Spanish learning book are for me to learn by practice, but I´ve been jumping around in them so much. Now I´m determined to read them start-to-finish. They were inspired by Church authorities, and I know they´ll make me fluent in both Spanish and the gospel.
In other news...cicaedas are really, really loud. At least, I think they´re cicaedas. Is that even how you spell cicaeda? Dang, I miss wikipedia. :) I´m thinking of those bugs that take like 17 years to hatch or whatever and make lots of noise. I don´t know if they´re cicaedas or what. All I know is there´s a bunch of really huge black bugs around and they sit in all the trees and they make the LOUDEST buzzing noise ever. It makes it really hard to teach sometimes when we have to sit under a tree full of cicaedas in order to teach in the comfortable shade. Also, Hna. deVries found a stick bug the other day. No idea how she noticed it, since we were walking on a road covered in dead grass. It was like some kind of grasshopper with powerful back legs, and it jumped, but it looked exactly like a stick. We totally would have caught it and taken it home for further observation and photos had we not been in the middle of our work day. Bummer. It was cool at the time, though. :)
Well, that´s all to report this week. Thank you Grandma, Teresa, Mom, Dad, Amanda, and Ashley for writing to me! I love you all so much! Take care, stay true, and don´t forget to keep praying for an opportunity every day to share the gospel and be a member missionary. I LOVE YOU!!
---Hna. Springer
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