Last week were transfers, and I´m staying here in Nueva Pompeya and this time with Elder Comp from Utah and we did some hard work this week! At the beginning of this month we had a meeting with all of the leaders in the Chacabuco Stake and they talked about how they are creating 2 new wards and how they are going to change all the ward boundaries and explained how due to the heavy concentration of members in the villas, they had to make some interesting changes. This led them to ask us to start to work outside the Villa and help grow the parts normally forgotten by the missionaries. So that was our goal and then we realized something. We are basically opening up a new area. There are very few families outside the villa and almost no old investigators. We started sharing out desires to work with the members and all of them were surprised. One family told us that we were in for some hard work because we are going to be"pioneers" for the ward. We talked to everybody and gave out a ton of copies of the Book of Mormon in parts that we are sure the missionaries hadn't been to in a very long time. We had never felt so satisfied with out work and then Sunday have nothing to show for it. Nobody came to church and then our numbers looked low, but our week was more than that. We had so many small miracles happen. One of the most noteworthy was with our efforts to help the ward. When we had the zone conference with the 70 Elder Levrino, he said we have to start asking more "how can I help my ward" and a lot less of "what can the ward to do help us?" So that´s what we've done. We have come up with a ton of ideas to help bring this ward back up and Saturday we had an unplanned meeting with the bishop and the youth presidents and we got to planning. As we left we hoped that it wouldn't have just been all talk and then Sunday the bishop started to talk about our plans and a lot of the members loved it and a lot more of them invited us to visit them and we are working more closely with the home teachers to help them get their visits done. This task is not going to be easy and there is no way we are going to be able to do it alone. Not only do we have God´s help (because in the end this is His work) we also have a lot of help from the Book of Mormon. We have been encouraging all the families to get better at their reading of the Book of Mormon so that they all personally could get blessed. Elder Comp explained it like this "Imagine that every morning, God came to your room and gave you 2 minutes to talk to Him and then He talked to you for 5 minutes. How incredible would that be? We can have that opportunity as we pray to Him and then read His words." Some of the greatest blessings we can receive will come from the Book of Mormon. One verse I really like is Mormon 8:35 "Behold, I speak unto you as if were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing." because it helps me understand that everything in this Book was put to help us in our day. Just because the world is going downhill doesn't mean we have to go with it. I add my testimony of the Book of Mormon that it is true and contains the words of Christ and "tells man what they must do to gain peace in this life and eternal salvation in the life to come."
-Elder Steele
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