When Life Gives You Cold Water, Heat Up Some Rocks

On Monday this week Monica started to not feel so well after eating some fruit. The next couple days were pretty rough and it ended up putting her out of commission on Wednesday completely. She’s doing much better now. Just part of the joy of getting used to living in a new place with a new diet.

While she was resting on Monday, I met with Shane Littlefield - our Area Mission Specialist - on zoom to go over progress and key indicators for the mission. Our mission has historically been setting really high goals, and there is often a huge deficit between the goal and the actuals at the end of every month. For example, in the month of July, we had 53 baptisms across the mission, but the goal set at the start of the month was 156. The goals all seem to be way higher than what we actually achieve. So unintentionally, it seems we’ve created a culture of failure, or never reaching our goals and just accepting that. So this week on Tuesday, during our MLC (mission leadership council) we talked about how we can change that. I wanted to help them understand that we can still set goals that will stretch us, but that aren’t completely out of reach.

In addition to goal setting, there have been other little things I’ve been receiving impressions about over the past month of being here that we should change or adjust to help us be more efficient as a mission. Some of these include; changing the day of the week our missionaries conduct their weekly-planning sessions in companions, which day/time they meet weekly with their districts, and also which day we hold our mission-wide weekly devotional over zoom. As I talked to our MLC group on Tuesday this week about these adjustments, I emphasized to them the importance of finding small and simple things that we can do to improve our efforts. We read the example of the Book of Mormon prophet, Alma teaching his sons this same principle in Alma chapter 37. I’m excited to see how these things will impact our efficiency and success!

Back row (left to right): E. Bray, Munk, Gomez, Klein, Mason, Kulbacki, Harris, Sanchez, Presidente Miranda, Gibson, Rodrigues, Sachetti, Olsen, Medeiros, Call
Front row (left to right): H. Peña, Barrett, Holt, Hadley, Jepsen, Franco, Presidente y Hermana Bartholomew, Garn, Silva, DeVries, Cavalcante, Clegg

The majority of this week was spent finishing up individual interviews with each missionary on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I have now officially interviewed every single one, and while exhausting, It’s been a very special opportunity the last few weeks to hear about each of them - their lives, their families back home, their personal conversion experience, why they chose to serve a mission, etc.

This week it rained for the first time since we’ve been here! We had a few days of it this week which was refreshing. Santiago is pretty similar to Salt Lake City with its winter smog, given that it is situated in a valley, so we really enjoyed seeing the mountains a little more clearly this week.

View from one of the Elders' apartments.

Another first of this week was dealing with a situation where missionaries needed to be switched areas for varying reasons. Instead of waiting until the start of the next transfer, we felt like it would be best to just switch them right away - so we had what we call our first “emergency transfer.” No need to worry though, everyone is doing fine and we think the switch will be beneficial to both companionships.

Saturday morning we went to the Santiago Temple with Elder & Sister Wright. They had asked if they could meet with us to talk about their assignments here in the mission, so we decided to go to the temple with them first, and then had lunch with them afterwards. Elder Wright worked for the church previously in their Self-Reliance program, and specifically helped the church develop a course on the topic of how to start a business. We’re hoping to have him use the knowledge and expertise he has to strengthen the members here and give them some new opportunities and avenues to improve their lives.

Temple with the Wrights

We had a pleasant surprise running into 4 of our missionaries who were visiting the temple grounds with some people they are teaching.

In the temple, a local member who was serving there was excited to meet us, and had even brought us a gift. Her name is Carly Morales, and she served a mission in Antofagasta, Chile, and has been home for a year or so. The gift she gave us was a painting of Jesus that she had painted after her mission. She told us that after her mission, she felt that she had developed a stronger testimony of and stronger relationships with Christ, and that helped her to paint him in a new way. She gave us each a copy - it was so thoughtful!

Sunday we attended church at Barrio (ward) Santa Rosa. They had a baptism after church for Andrea today. When we arrived, the bishop told me that the hot water heater wasn’t working in the chapel, and though they had called earlier in the week to get it fixed and were told it was ready to go, when they showed up on Sunday the water was freezing. The Elders got creative and started boiling some pans of water in the kitchen at the church. They also found some big rocks from outside, washed them off, heated them in the church oven, and put them in the font to warm up the water. It ended up working quite well! They didn’t fill it up as high as normal because of the cold water, so when the poor Elder tried to baptize Andrea, she wasn’t fully submerged in the water and he had to try again 3 different times. Eventually she kneeled down and then it worked!

Boiling water, and putting rocks in the oven to heat up the water in the baptismal font;

Today (August 3rd) was Monica’s mother’s birthday, and being the first birthday since she passed, it was a special day for her to feel close to her. Miriam, a sweet woman at church gave her a big hug, like they had been friends forever. She told Monica that she felt their souls have met before. She gave her some white butter toffee with nuts that smelled just like the kind her mom used to make.

Tonight we attended one more baptism in Paine for Engervet. We had met him a few weeks ago when attending another baptism, so he was super excited to see us and was glad we remembered to come to his baptism this week. He’s from Venezuela and is such a kind, sweet man.