Monday, April 15, 2013

4-15-13




Hey Mom,
Things are going good here as always. I got my glasses and everything taken care of. They are ray bans so the frames are really nice. They aren’t big or heavy so they aren’t falling off of my face every day, that’s always a bonus. 

This week has been crazy flipping hot though. Sometimes we walk outside and I forget I'm in Guate and think I’m in Africa for a moment. I never thought I would say this but I am pretty much ready for the rainy season to roll in so that it’s not so flippin hot anymore. Like temperature wise it's never over 100 here, but we're so close to the equator and the fact that my mission is the highest in elevation in Central America, sometimes it feels like you can just reach out and touch the sun. Boiling right now. 

We had some really really cool lessons this week. We found a partial family that we have been teaching and brought them to church. It’s just a mom and her two kids, but the mom is terminally ill. She has some kind of brain cancer and the doctors only give her until the end of May to live. It's really really sad. The tumor is right behind her left eye and it makes that whole side of her face bulge and her eye is almost popping out of the socket. But she came to church on Sunday and brought her daughter who isn’t baptized and she was saying one of the last things she wants to do is see her daughter get baptized. 

Another investigator we have is a man that is deaf and mute, and about a month ago he fell from a tree they were cutting down for firewood and now he is paralyzed from the waist down. I love going to teach him because you can tell he is dying just being cooped up in the house like he is. We gave him the Book of Mormon the other day and he was so grateful you could tell he was on the verge of tears. We always like to go visit him because his kids always teach us little things in sign language. It's hard to talk to the dad because we have to say what we want to his 12 year old son or 10 year old daughter and they sign it to him, he signs back to them, and then they tell us. It's just really cool seeing them talking like that with their hands, it's super impressive. It's interesting too because his wife is also mute and deaf, perfect match. 

We were talking with another member this week also and he has a son that has a heart problem. His heart I think is too big and beats too fast, so his skin is almost blue-ish because of all the blood and stuff. They only calculate he will live for a few more years too. But this member was telling us how they had gone to visit this man's parent's tombstones this week and the son went and laid the flowers down on his grandparents grave, walked back to his dad and sad, ``Dad, when I die you guys will come and bring me flowers, right"?  I was just kind of like...whoa. 

It happens a lot in the mission when you see the situations of others and it really put your life into a new perspective. When looking at the life of a terminally ill person, or someone who feels trapped in his own body, my problems rapidly diminish. I was thinking about Ether 12:4, when it talks about hope. Most of the time when we are talking about hope in normal life we always see it with a twinge of doubt. For me it's pretty much always there. But like it says hope can become an anchor. Anchors are pretty sure and don’t move, you just imagine a big dead weight. But the difference between this kind of hope and the, I hope this person will call, or I hope it's not so hot tomorrow is that it's hope that comes from our faith, like the scripture says, leads us to be sure and steadfast. Those two words don’t leave much room for doubt. It leads to good actions, like the watching your daughter get baptized or reading the Book of Mormon. That’s when people really find out whether they believe in Christ or not, when you’re looking at the end. It was just kind of a crazy learning experience, and super humbling at the same time. 

Anyways, sorry I don’t have a whole lot of time for writing this week, 
I love you all and I'll talk to you next week.
Adam
Oh P.S. this photo is my posterity. I have a great grandson now.

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