Thursday, November 26, 2015

Week 8: Julias Caesar, the Prophet...

Hello to everyone!!

Another exciting week down! The time is flying literally! As of today, I've been out for 2 months exactly! The time is flying by! I can hardly believe that I have 22 months left... Where is the time going!

First off, I want to apologize last weeks letter was kind of just a ramble I realized, about all of the crazy things that had happened in the week. I'll try and improve this time

In la obra misional (missionary work) it's been interesting going, we've been doing a ton of finding / searching for new investigators, we don't have that many solid investigators right now, so we need to find more. So we've been looking all over the old investigators that are from 2 years or so ago, and also we've just been doing lot's of street contacts/door contacts. And we've had a little bit of success. There are a few people that are interested a little bit and will let us talk to them. Fewer that will let us in. And even fewer that can see the significance of the Gospel in their life/want to apply the teaching or keep commitments. It's a little rough going, but Elder Tolentino and I are sure that if we keep searching we can find someone that is prepared to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ in their life.

Just barely earlier today, we had a District activity, where we went over the pension of the District Leader and ate a bunch of Hamburgers and got to hang around a little bit and watch some church music videos. Some of the videos were pretty weird though, because part of them weren't from our church, they were from the Evangelic church, it was pretty interesting to say the least, but fun to get to talk with some other Elders.

I had a little health issue this week. The weather here can be extremely strange, it's spring here. So it's beginning to warm up. Most day's it's a pretty nice temperature, but this week was off. The first two days was boiling hot. We were sweating horribly in our short sleeve shirts. Then the next day, what else could happen, but... Oh a storm, the storms here are nothing like in Utah, it rains hard. And some times there is this thing, I don't know if there is a word for it in English, but they call it them Rafagas (spelling?). It rains extremely hard here, and then it can get horribly windy, we didn't experience any of that this week, but my companion told me about a time when he and one of his other companions were caught in a rafagas, where it was raining like crazy and the wind was horrid and he said they could hardly breath. It was almost like they were swimming. But, on Wednesday, we just got the hardcore rain, and it got so cold. And I didn't have my gloves and the rain came on the day that we didn't have any fixed appointments. So we were out searching all day, no one let us in, we talked to a few people, but we didn't get anywhere, so after freezing all day. We return back to our pension and I get my hands by our little space heater to warm them up. They dry off and then 5 minutes later... They start swelling. The weirdest thing, my fingers swelled up oddly large. I took some ibuprofen, slept, and by the end of the next day, they were fine. It just felt like I was wearing gloves all the next day. 

Yesterday was a big day in Argentina, the vote. They elected a new president. But because of the vote yesterday, us missionaries couldn't do anything all day, our mission president didn't want us out proselyting in case people thought we were soliciting for the vote or if there were some other sort of problem, because the government is a little bit different down here. So we went to church, then we had lunch at a family of members house, and we were able to talk to them there and hang out a little bit until around 4:30 then we had to head back and stay in our pension for the rest of the night. It was good, we got some good stuff done we planned a little bit for our open church tour that we are doing in about 2 weeks. But now Argentina has a new president, I think his name is Macri or something, I don't really know. But hopefully things go well for Argentina.

Also, we've been looking around a lot for new investigators, like I said, and we found the most peculiar one. We were on our way to go look for another old Investigator of some other missionaries from 2 years ago, and we were walking down the street. I see this man sitting in his yard in a chair with his wife, drinking MatĂ© (a drink that everyone drinks down here, essentially a cup full of herbs with any type of liquid) And I've been working on my contacting skills, so I decide to say hello to him. I start talking, and we tell him we are missionaries and everything, he say's that's great, and we get him to let us in and we are talking in his yard. He tells us that his name is "Julias Caesar". Well he is a member of the some odd branch of the Evangelic church, and he says he's read the bible all the way through, and when we tell him about a few things about the restoration of the Gospel he starts talking about his church, how it started with the hoax of 1844. How a preacher prophesied Christ would come in that year, and then he didn't. And so now there are a bunch of followers of a random church that predict every so often when Christ will come, but they haven't been right yet, but he still believes in the church. Very odd, we leave him with a pamphlet about the restoration and set up another appointment for later in the week and off we go. Well we come back for our appointment, and we start talking to him on the "sidewalk" in front of his house. And he say's he read through our pamphlet and none of it can be true, he starts referencing all these scriptures from the bible about prophets and how it doesn't say anywhere anything about Joseph Smith. Then he continues to say "I really wish there were more young men like you who would go aroud and preach the word of God, I really appreciate it. But if you are going to preach to the people, please... Preach the truth!" Ouch right, well we tried to talk to him about how the need for prophets in every time that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is on the Earth, and he starts saying that the Book of Mormon isn't the word of God, because the bible say's there will not be any more books. And he say's that all that he needs for him is in the  bible. We tell him about how we need prophets to guide the church, then he continue's "We don't need prophets, we have the bible, anyone can be a prophet if they read the bible and pray. I read the bible, I am a prophet. I don't need any Joseph Smith to guide me." It was a very interesting conversation, after he said that we just stood there listening to him talk for another 5 minutes, then Elder Tolentino and I bore our testimonies about the gospel and how Thomas S. Monson is a prophet today on the earth, and about the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and then we excused ourselves. It was one of the weirdest encounters. I hope he comes to find the church someday. But I guess I continue the Slack and Bonney tradition of attracting weird people. It was interesting. 

I've gotten to break out the yo-yo a bit this week, I've showed a few of our investigators, and once I was even called a stud by a 60 year old woman, so I guess that makes me pretty cool.

That's all for now. See you next week!

Elder Slack
Argentina Buenos Aires South Mission

Mailing Address of the mission home:

Elder Stockton Gerald Slack
Quintana 447
1846 AdroguĂ©, 
Buenos Aires
Argentina



Elder Tolentino and I in the rain!

my hand when it was swelling

Banana plus Dulce de Leche = the best ever

district activity

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