Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Ambato 7.13.15

HIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!
ok first, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOMORROW DAD!! I love you so so much and i hope you have the best day! 

Ok so this week has been CRAZY!! We went to Quito for two days so that put a little damper on our work schedule, but we still had some sucess.  We were contacting of Saturday and we found this lady whose sister is a member of the church.  We entered her store and started teaching her about José Smith and she started freaking out!  Screaming how God would never appear to a 14 year old boy etc. etc.  She has seen videos about the church that have put complete false ideas into her head. So we decided to take a different approach and talk about the Book of Mormon.  In the end the spirit was so strong!  My companion testified about the fact that people DIED for this book and that God wants us to read it to know if it is true.  By the end she said she was going to start reading a praying about it.  The spirit truly can work miracles!! 

On Monday we were going to have family night with the bishop and familia lopez at 8, but they called and said that they had to go earlier.  So i called the Bishop and he was like "call my wife to ask her if you can go at 7"  so he gave me her number and i dialed, and then he answered and burst out laughing because he had given me his number again... ok maybe not that funny for all of you but i was dying of laughter.  

So this week the pope came to Ecuador.  For those of you that dont know, Ecuador is one of the most catholic countries in the world... because it was conquered by the spaniards. Like i have gone to some pretty poor cities where people dont have much, but there is always a HUGE catholic church in the middle.  Needless to say, people were SO EXCITED that the pope was coming.  Literally everyone was talking about it, and it made for a harder week.  But is has been funny because in spanish the pope is "el papa" but because papa ends in "a"... i have been thinking that it is a feminine noun all week and calling the pope "la papa"  or in other words "the potato" oops..... 

I have felt impressed to study about tender mercies this week because it is somehting that i really fail to see in my life.  I studied the talk by Elder Bednar "tender mercies" 

"God does not have a list of favorites to which we must hope our names will someday beadded. He does not limit “the chosen” to a restrictedfew. Rather, it is our hearts and our aspirations and ourobedience which definitively determine whether we arecounted as one of God’s chosen."

As i read his talk i reallized that i needed to be a lot more aware of the tender mercies of the Lord in my life.  
So on Wednesday i was feeling pretty down.  I was looking through one of my desk drawers and found my wallet with my passport stuff in it.  I decided to look through it for the first time in my mission.  As i looked through it i found a letter that Sam had written me the day i left on my mission.  I had completely forgotten about this letter.  I remember when i read it in the airplane to Mexico... it really didnt have much meaning for me.  But as i read it this night, i felt as though The Lord was trying to talk to me through this letter.  He wrote that he had felt very inspired to write me this letter, and the first time i read it i couldnt imagine why, but now i do. The Lord uses His children to fufill His purposes in His time.  And He used the feelings that Sam had almost a year ago, to write me a letter, in order to fufill His purposes at this time in my mission.  And what Sam wrote to me, was EXACTLY what i needed to hear in this moment. I am so grateful to Sam for recognizing that spiritual promting when he did, and for the tender mercies of The Lord in our lives.  

I love Him.  He love us.  

And i love you all so much. 

Hermana Neff 

Just a nice view in Ambato:
This is Dominica, I took this picture in a bad moment.

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