Monday, April 19, 2010

The World is Potato Shaped



Familia,

Bernardo has been praying for years to find the true church and yesterday he was made part of it. It was really special and "emoncional" for him. I am so grateful that I could be part of his conversion. In his testimony after his baptism he said that he hopes to help fill the chapel with baptized hermanos. He is just so excited to bring other people to the church and he feels responsible to do it.

One of my favorite parts of the conversion process is how things in their homes and their appearance change. For example in the case of Rodrigo and Claudio, they had lots of pamphlets from all types of religions, displayed on their coffee table. After the second visit they had them all gathered up in a pile and after the third visit they disappeared all together. Before our stake conference with the transmission from Salt lake of President Monson, they had a huge statue of the virgin Mary. After the conference she disappeared. Rodrigo has always had a goatee and after he received the priesthood last week, he shaved it off. We don´t tell them to do these things, the Spirit whispers it to them.

This week we did a contact outside of a bar and at the end I gave the guy a pass along card. When I handed it to him he asked me if he could give me a card, and I said, “Yes.” He handed me a “Happy hour” card. Think about the significance of that exchange.

Yesterday I got pooped on by a bird. It was the second time in three weeks. This time was worse, it landed in three spots on my sweater sleeve, and left a huge smear on my skirt. Eeeeewww. But I actually wasn´t that bugged by it, small frustrations don´t seem to affect me so much anymore.

I heard this week that the world is actually potato shaped not round.

Aside from the baptism we were really excited yesterday because a family of 8 came to church and 2 less active embers. Alicia and Salome are a mother and daughter. They haven´t been to church for two or three years and I had heard that Alicia is really stubborn. But we went to visit them. The first visit we learned that she doesn´t go because we talk too much about the personal life of Joseph Smith and it is like we adore him. That is a really hard doubt to solve. So there was a little contention in the first visit. We learned that that is not going to solve anything. We learned that we can´t force her to look at things from our perspective; we have to go to her perspective and give her the tools to change her perspective. There are imperfections in the church, but I want all of you to know that these imperfections shouldn´t keep us from the more important and necessary ordinances that the church offers us.

I love you. Show the love this week,

Hermana Arnold

PS (Regarding photos) I cut my hair last week. and there is a story behind it. There is a less active hermana that lives in our building and we heard that she cuts hair and that she doesn´t let people from the church visit her. so we came up with the idea to cut our hair to be able to enter her home. so we knocked on the door and told her we wanted to get our hair cut, she couldn´t say no of course. so she cut our hair and is our friend and with time we are going to help her go back to church. and it will have all started with two hair cuts.

Bernardo´s baptism. Do you notice that Rodrigo looks different?

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