Well, this week was a bit of a rollercoaster haha. We´ve been reviewing the lessons with Manuel and Heidi and it´s been a little bit difficult. Bless his heart, Manuel doesn´t remember things very well, so it was like we were teaching him the lessons for the first time all over again. They have been really excited about being members though and even attended church without Julia, their fellowshipper.
We´ve started teaching a 19 year-old named Steven Falcon. We first met him after church when the gospel doctrine teacher, Jefferson Peres, came up to us and said, "Um, I think this guy wants to talk to you guys". When of the first things out of Steven´s mouth was, "So, how can I get baptized?" We were kind of caught off guard by his question and explained to him what he needed to do. He´s attended church four times already, which is the hardest part. We taught him lesson one on Wedensday. When we asked him to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know if it´s true, he was like, "Oh, I already know it´s true but yeah, sure, I´ll pray anyways." Afterwards Elder Garcia was kind of freaked out. He´s like "This is weird. It´s never this easy. What´s his deal?" But I was just happy to have an investigator whose excited and ready to learn. He was asking a lot of really good questions and seemed like he was understanding it all. Also, he looks like an Ecuadorian version of Daniel Radcliffe. That´s always a plus in any situation.:)
We had something called mini-conferencia where the Sister Training Leaders and Zone Leaders taught us lessons instead of having district and zone meeting. I really loved what they said and I was really excited because I actually understood everyone´s Spanish! Our Hermana Lideres are named Hermana Paredes (President Christensen always calls her "Sister Walls") and Hermana Martinez and our Lideres de Zona are Elder Arrambari and Elder Waldie. Elder Waldie shared an experience from when he was in his third transfer. He´d just gotten a new companion and because his other companion wasn´t there, many of his investigators stopped taking the lessons. He talked about the importance of having patience during your trials and said God always blesses, but sometimes it´s with thing that we need and not things we want. I thought that was so cool.
That message couldn´t have come any sooner because the remainder of this week tested my patience a lot! We had three days in a row where nearly every single appointment and backup plan failed. We ended up knocking doors and street contacting all day. We had one lesson with a recent convert named Evelyn. I was like "Finally! We have a lesson today!" We started to teach when all of the sudden she made a dash for the bathroom and threw up. She said that she´d been sick for a while but that we could keep teaching and she´d be okay. We decided to just share a scripture, but several times during our reading she went back to the bathroom. We ended up just giving her a blessing and said we´d come back another time.
They have a saying here in Ecuador whenever it rains. They say that the heavens are crying. Well, the past couple of days, the heavens have been sobbing uncontrollably and my umbrella decided it would be a good time to break in half. Rain is nice, but I did not enjoy being out in the rains of Quito without an umbrella. To top the week off, I got really sick Saturday night and yesterday. I was up almost all of Saturday night and suffering for most of Sunday. I won´t get into the details because it was pretty ugly, but I´ll just say this: I´m never eating from the Pizzaria across the street EVER again! I feel a lot better now and I got to talk to Hermana Sjovold because she´s the mission nurse.
So, this past week wasn´t very fun. But the words of an Elder Holland devotional have been coming to my mind a lot throughout all of this. He was talking about missionaries and mission presidents that he´s talked to who have expressed frustration about why this work is so hard. His answer is a little bit blunt (characteristic of an Elder Holland talk): "Why is this work so hard, you might ask? Because salvation is NOT a cheap experience! We are representatives of Jesus Christ. How could we ever expect it to be easy for us when it was NEVER easy for him?" We wathced that in the CCM and some people in our district actually cried. Whenever I am frustrated and feel like I need to take a break or I don´t want to work as hard, I´ve had to think a lot about him who suffered more and took zero breaks.
I´m hoping for a better week next week but I´m grateful for this last one. I´m sorry I don´t have any pictures, there weren´t a lot of pretty things to see. Thank you all for your love and support. Los quiero mucho and I hope you´re all doing well!
De Ecuador con Amor,
Elder Travis Hicks
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