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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