I hope that all is well with each of you. Thanks for the emails and for the updates. I am writing a little later today as this was our P Day of "limpieza," a day to clean the apartment. It was rather dirty, but Elder Candia and I did a great job tidying things up.
It's always hard to know what to write because a lot happens in a week, but I made a note of some experiences in my planner so I would not forget. First just a note about my first zone conference, it was great. President Lovell is a super spiritual dude. We talked about integrity and the importance of finding joy every day of our mission. After zone conference Elder Goar from our district left for another city so Elder Candia and me were with Elder Moreira from Uruguay for four days. We worked hard every day, but we also took advantage of the free time we have here. Elder Moreira is a master chef and made awesome food for us while we played a board game called "TEG" which is an Argentine version of the game "RISK."
At the end of every day here we evaluate our "numbers," and account for the lessons we had with investigators, with less actives, references received and contacted, etc. Numbers wise, this was a rough week, but yesterday really made up the difference. After church we randomly ran into a young man who told us that he wanted us to come talk to him and share a message. We obviously accepted and talked about the importance of the Atonement, and that God is our loving Heavenly Father. After sharing he opened up to us and said that he was baptized about 4 years ago in the Mormon church, but is scared to come back. We are going to stop by his house this week and bring him with us. It's true that people are put into our path for a reason. I'm excited to help that young man come back to church.
Right after the lesson we visited a less active sister who was really sick. She asked if I could give her a blessing. I was really nervous to do it in Spanish but really felt the spirit helping me the whole time. We finished the day by administering the Sacrament to a man in our ward who can't come to church because he has difficulty walking.
All in all yesterday was a day full of ministering, and really doing what I know the Savior would have done here in Frutillar, Bariloche, Argentina. I am growing here and coming to know my Savior more and more as He invites me to do His work.
One of our messages in Sacrament meeting really impressed me. Put simply, it was an invitation to replace the word "problem" with the word "challenge." A problem, it was put forth, is something we may not be able to fix, but a challenge is something that we can work on and even have fun with. It's something I'm going to try to do more here.
Elder Kauffman aka Jack