Javier's Baptism and Cutting Grass With Machetes

Elder Lund at J's Baptism

Buenas!

Another great week in the mission field. I love Honduras, especially Santa Rosa. The people are awesome, the food is great, there´s very little crime (well, relatively), and the weather is similar to Carmel (except about 10-20 degrees hotter). It´s a little foggy in the morning but it burns off by 10:00 in the morning. It get´s pretty hot, but it´s not as humid as San Pedro Sula (or Han Hedro Hula as some of the people pronounce it).

I finished up Our Heritage in a day and a half. It was really good and I´ll use a lot of the stories in future lessons. There was one story of a women who saved up 50,000 pennies over the course of a year for the temple (I think it was Nauvoo, but I can´t quite remember). It was a huge contribution, but it came to pass by small and simple means. Sometimes (well, most of the time actually) we can be very impatient, especially with ourselves. I´ve been very impatient with myself at times during these first three weeks. We expect something to develop or occur instantaneously. Great things are brought to pass, however, by doing the little things daily. "Success is a lot of little things done right." It would have been easy for the women to give up after only gathering a handful of pennies, but that´s not what happened. She kept searching for them each and every day, and after a year the result of her work was tremendous. In order to develop a skill or learn anything, we need to:

1. Come up with a list of daily things we need to do to fulfill the ultimate "vision"
2. START doing those things daily (sometimes this is the toughest step)
3. Continue doing those things daily
   

There is a great Mormon Message (Flecks of Gold) that teaches this principle. It was great to finish that book. As I said earlier, I finished this book in a day and a half and I also finished Our Search For Happiness on the two flights to the MTC. I now have one more book to go: Jesus the Christ. It´s going to take a while, especially since there is a lot more detail in the text. But, it´s all about reading a little bit each day.

We did a lot of service this week. The first two weeks in the field, we didn´t do as much service as I would have liked to do. Often times we would sit on the couch in a member´s home and either talk with ourselves or talk with the family for long periods of time. This is a good thing (develop trust with the members) but it felt like we weren´t doing any work. This week, I started taking initiative in serving others throughout the day. It started out as washing the dishes whenever we ate at member´s houses. My companion then found other ways of doing service afterwards. We helped Javier´s dad (I´ll explain him later) build a fence. He´s really critical of the gospel, but we saw much progress with his attitude just by helping him. We then helped cut grass with machetes at another investigators house (Chapear is the verb). It was right next to a small stream with a bunch of trash. It smelled really bad, but it was really fun too. Finally, we helped with a member Saturday morning. He´s building a new house and we helped out. We were all exhausted afterward. Unfortunately, we have a bunch of blisters on our hands, but it´ll be better in the future. It felt really good to finally give a lot of service throughout the week. 

We had our first baptism this week! J is 18. He is the only one getting baptized in his family (well, as for right now). As I said earlier, his dad really doesn´t like the church, but because of our service, he is starting to open up. He went to his son´s baptism (he had originally said he would never go) and hopefully we can start teaching him soon. I didn´t teach J any lessons. He had already been taught when I got here, but I still felt really happy for him and am excited for his continuing growth in the church. A member of the church (who just got called to serve his mission in Brazil) baptized him. In our mission, the members are encouraged to do the baptisms since the missionaries will eventually leave and that way there is more of a bond with the convert and the member. I won´t be surprised if I don´t actually baptize anyone these two years. At first I was a little upset at that idea, but I´ve started to accept it and be ok with it.

That´s all I have. I love and miss all of you!

¡Nos Vemos...Vaya...y Cheque Leque!

-Elder Lund

Santa Rosa de Copan, Honduras 2/18/14 - 2/24/14