Weekly Letter: August 3-9, 2010

The cambios have come again, and with them come....change. I was in quite the situation last week. Whenever I thought of the cambios, I dreaded the change, but also looked forward to it. It´s hard to explain, I tried to explain it last week, but I think I failed to do so adequately. I would try again this week, but I know I´ll just waste time and energy only to fail again. Oh well. One of the changes that I wasn´t looking forward to was saying good-bye to my District Leader, Elder Steed.

This last week was surreal to see him leave. We had both gone to Alta together, but hadn´t really gotten to know each other very well because of difference in age, but I had known and been friends with his younger brother, Russell, and they look very similar to each other, so I recognized him instantly to be his brother. It was a great experience having him as a district leader these last two transfers. He basically was smiling every moment for those 12 weeks. I bet he even smiles when asleep! So it´s really weird to think that he´s right now on the airplane ride home. But I know that he served honorably and I´m very grateful for the opportunity that I had to get to know him here in the Mission.

But this was only of the changes that came. I´m going to receive another companion here in Plateros. So I get to stay here with the people I knew and got to love these last 3 and a half months....but I lose my companion (well, one of them, Manuel is basically the third Elder). Elder Childers is actually returning to the area he was in before he came to Plateros, but this time as District Leader. There, he is going to complete his mission. So my Stepfather(in the mission) is going to die(in the mission) in Camarones.(it´s a place, but it´s named after a shrimp---yeah, the fish in the ocean. Why? I have no idea. No one does.) [Basically I just used some lingo from the mission which sounds really weird in English, I imagine that it does in Spanish too, but all the elders that I talk to understand what I mean when I use it, so I don´t think it´s so weird. So if any of you don´t understand what I said, just skip that sentence because I was basically repeating myself in Mission lingo.]

So I´m going to receive Elder Gamez here in plateros. Once again, I´m going to have to teach him the area, but it´s okay, at least I´m not senior companion. Right now, I think that would be too much of a headache for me. I guess I haven´t learned all I could from this area, because I´ll be here another 6 weeks. That´s actually okay, what I was hoping for actually, because we were going to have a lot of baptisms this Sunday, but all but one fell through at the last minute.

The only one that got baptized was a member from a less-active family that had been baptized a year before. The bishop had given us this name because the daughter had been baptized a year before, but went to Canada the week after for 6 months without being confirmed. Elder Javier and I had worked hard in finding her, but she had been busy because she was preparing to be married. When she got married, she then went on a honeymoon, but these last two week she had returned again. When we finally had an appointment with her last week we explained that because it had been a long time since her baptism that she had to repeat the ordinance. She accepted the idea pretty easily, since she had already made the decision once. We then asked her when she would be baptized, and she asked if she could this sunday. We were like... "Ummm.....YEAH!" She got interviewed two days latter, and, even though she was a little sick, she came to church and got baptized after the services.

So yeah, I was a little sad that the other 6 baptisms that we had set for that date fell through, but during that one baptism, I forgot everything. I definitely need to work on the other 6 that weren´t able to. The Orea Zavaleta family, had to do a lot of paperwork with the house(which they are to inherit from Uriel´s grandmother who passed away recently), Carolina and Fernanda weren´t able to go because of a family commitment for their father´s birthday, and Guillermo and Socorro couldn´t get interviewed and didn´t go to church. So we had one baptism this week, but we still have a lot of work to do. I wonder how my companion is going to react when I tell him that we had 7 set for baptism this week and only one got baptized. He´s probably going think, "Oh, we have some work to do here." I think I´m still learning patience daily, and I´m learning a lot about the agency of others. We can only do so much, it´s their decision. But we´re going to work hard on having a lot of baptisms the next week....especially if the other family we challenged to baptism this last week follows through on their commitment.

Anyway, time is short. Thank you for the support. Please continue praying for me. I know it would be a mistake to say that I´m completely ready for what will come this cambio, because if I had already learned the lessons, why would I have to experience it again? Pray for me to learn and improve daily.

Cariños,

Elder Blackham

Weekly Letter: May 11-18

Para todos uds:

Another week in Mexico! I don´t think I´ll ever get tired of saying that! Some times I can´t believe that I´m here on my mission, in Mexico City! Tomorrow morning is the ¨cambios¨ or changes in the mission. I´ve already found out that I´m going to stay in the area of Plateros with my companion, not only for this cambio (which is the final cambio of my mission president, President Fuentes) but for the next one as well, and maybe longer. So I´m pretty excited that I didn´t get changed, I didn´t expect that I would be, because I´ve only been here in this area for like four weeks or so.

This week for P-day was pretty cool. Because tomorrow is the cambio, we don´t have district meetings, so we were able to get permission to spend today in another area and take pictures of some places in the Mixcoac-Olivar area. My companion and I, with the two Elders posted in Mixcoac-Olivar, were able to travel to furthest reaches of their area, our zone, and our mission, which is the plaza at Zocalo, the central-most point of both the Modern and Ancient Aztec City. I´ve attached a few pictures of the Church at Zocalo, as well as some less-than-impressive ruins of what used to be the Aztec pyramids in Central Tenochitlan. (There are other, more impressive pyramids in the city, but, unfortunately, they are not in our mission, let alone our zone, so we weren´t able to visit them.) So I hope you enjoy are able to see these pictures and enjoy them!

This week was up and down for us. There were some unbelievable highs, and some unbelievable lows. The thing is, whenever we experienced a low, whether it be an appointment falling through or something like that, we would stop what we were doing, read in El Libro de Mormón outloud and pray to know where we needed to go. One of these times, after praying, I told my companion that we were going to pass the house of some family that we contacted before but never were there when we passed by. My companion questioned why we were going to pass by them, saying they were ¨Chafa¨ or unreliable....or slackers. I told him, with slight tongue in cheek (but all the while hoping that it was true) that all was well, that we were going to find una persona escogida (chosen person) that was ready to receive us.

When we finally passed by that family, they, once again, weren´t there, but on the way to this family we encountered this lady, gave her a picture of Christ coming to the Americas and explained a little bit about our message. When we asked her if she was willing to listen to this message, she asked us quite frankly ¨Are you mormons?¨ As a missionary, at least in this area, you pretty much brace yourself to hear all about the rumors about the mormons as soon as the word ¨Mormon¨ is mentioned. This time, however, she told us that she had a brother in the United States, who had just been baptized recently and who had told her to look up the Mormon church. She told us that she had already tried to visit the chapel several times, but that it was never open. We told her that our worship services were on Sundays at 10:00am, and she said she would be there. We also taught her two lessons, unfortunately, she has a daughter with many doubts and a propensity to ¨planchar¨ or bible bash. In both of our appointments, she just contradicted pretty much everything we said, and we got a little discouraged because the mother didn´t say anything during any of our lessons, so we have know idea how she is receiving it. On friday, she told us again that she would go to church on Sunday, but she never showed(that was one of the lows) so we´re going to try to contact her again this week, because we were going to set another appointment with her in the chapel.

Another high of this week was when we contacted a referral from another group of missionaries. We were able to contact them and teach them the first lesson in the same visit, and we´re going to contact them again as soon as the husband knows what his work schedule is. We also received a member referral from a family who has a son on a mission right now. We also contacted them and taught them the plan of salvation, we set another appointment with them for Saturday, but when passed by, they weren´t there. We called the husband´s cellular and he told us that he was in the hospital with his grandmother who is deathly ill(one of the reasons we taught him the Plan of Salvation), and told us to call him back this week to set another appointment. To add to the list of referral miracles, when we went to the chapel Sunday, we encountered a mother and her teenage sons at the chapel. We had contacted them the week before, and she had told us that she lived in Queso (yes that´s a name of neighborhood) and that she was interested in our message, we told her that Queso was not in our area, but that there were missionaries in Puerta Grande, who would contact her. We then sent her name and address to Elder Fajardo and Elder Mendoza, the Elders in Puerta Grande (and our Zone and District Leader, respectively) and really didn´t think much about her....until we encountered her again in the chapel. She told us that she and her three sons all have a baptismal date set for this next Sunday!

All these "Referral miracles" really strengthened my testimony in the power and the efficacy of working with the members, with missionaries in our zone, and in our mission. Surely, the Lord is working miracles in this area. I only hope that we can do the Lord´s will.

Well, I´m about out of time, so I better go. Thank you all for your love and support. Thank you for your prayers, they really do help!

Con Amor,

Elder Blackham