Keep Rolling On

Email written: 1/23/17

So last Pday we went bowling. Now for those of you who know me, I'm not the best at it and I usually end up losing, but this time after a rough start I was competing to take 1st. It was the last frame and I needed a spare to have a chance for the win, and I don'´t know how, but I got it! I started to celebrate and I thought I had already won and it didn't matter how many pins I had to knock down so I got careless and after walking back to see the score I had lost by 1 point. 1 point! I was so close. Then I thought how great of a lesson I could learn from that. It doesn't just matter how we start or how we do in the middle, but we also have to finish well. We have to be able to endure to the end and be consistent in everything that we do. This went perfectly with my talk that I had to give Sunday, about eternal marriage (yes, I being a missionary had to give a talk about eternal marriage) in how we always need to do what's right and not let up. This also applies a lot because in these past few weeks along with our efforts to find, we have been looking for those members who may have fallen away and stopped attending church. After talking to a lot, Elder Howard and I realized how easily someone can lose their chance at salvation for the smallest things. 

On Saturday night we received a reference of someone in the villa and the elders told us that they set an appointment with her for Sunday at 6:30pm. We knew the general area of where it was, but the thing with the villa is that they are grouped in blocks and have a ton of passageways inside and it´s really hard to find a direction. We entered about 7 passageways and we just couldn't find the house. We had put the goal to give out 6 copies of the Book of Mormon and we felt even more committed to do it, and one of the miracles in trying to look for this house, we were able to give out 5 books to some really special people (including some from a group of guys that "run the villa" and even though they haven´t made the best choices in life we felt God´s love really strong for them). We were about to give up looking for the direction and started to find an exit out of the passage and as we were leaving we saw the house number and even though the person wasn't home, her neighbors were and they accepted the Book of Mormon and had a ton of questions that we could answer using the Book and they accepted a challenge to be baptized, but couldn't accept a date because they go to Perú for vacation until April, but we planted some good seeds. It amazed me how many miracles we saw Sunday just for the mere fact that we kept going and didn't want to give up. 

-Elder Steele

Pics- Finally got neighbors and neither of us have curtains so we made do with what we have.