06 September 2009

September 2, 2009

Hola,

This week was pretty crazy! In case you didn´t hear, my Grandpa Hales passed away on Friday, Aug 28. I was upset for a little bit, but now I´m doing great and back on track. Anyway, I don’t want to leave everyone depressed, so here´s a funny story. Yesterday my companion and I were walking along, around 7 pm at night. We passed a store. Outside the store were two barrachos (drunk guys), and they shouted, ¨hey, do you believe in Jesus?´ Of course we do, so we started talking to them. One of them told us he was a pastor at another church…haha…and started hugging us and shaking our hands. The other one didn´t say anything, so the first barracho shouted at him, ´these are my friends, and they believe in jesus!´ The second barracho shouted back, ´well I don´t believe in Jesus!´ This ticked the first barracho off, so he went over to the second one, grabbed his shirt, and started shaking him, telling him he needed to believe in jesus, that we were his amigos, and that he was a pastor at a church. Well, of course, the second barracho wasn´t happy with this and started shoving and yelling back. They ended up almost fighting while were were just standing there, thinking, oh man we just caused two guys to fight over jesus! Anyway, it ended when one of them just stumbled away, angry and shouting jibberish. Then the first barracho (who was the ´pastor´) came back over and talked to us, hugging us, shaking our hands, and shouting ´gloria a Dios!´ Haha it was crazy. But, it wasn´t for nothing because we got his addresss and we might pass by his house one day. Well, we´re going to have 5 baptisms on Saturday! We´re really excited and pumped. Alvertina, Fani, Nicol, Tomas, y Valeria are all going to be baptized. Its gonna be awesome.

This week I learned a lot. While I was walking around in the villa, where there is more sin and filth and dogs than probably anywhere else in the world, I was having a really hard time loving what I saw. In fact, I hated it. But I realized that that was ok. I could hate the filth and the sin and the dogs. I needed to hate that. But what I did have was a love for the PEOPLE. When I looked in people´s eyes, I realized that I cared for all of them. I wanted to help them. I wanted them to break the cycle of living in the villa and make more of their lives. And the only way I know how to do that is to help them come to Christ through His gospel. I saw the gospel literally change Alvertina, and I´m seeing it change me too. That´s the answer. Anyway, I thought that was pretty cool when I realized that. By the way, if you want to check out the villa on google, do street view from Av. Curapaligue and Ave. Cobo and go south. I don´t know if it works, but I hope you can all see it. It´s wild.

Well, I gotta go. Go eat some peanut butter for me.
Gracias
Elder Hales

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