Elder Jeffrey Hurst: Week 3

So this week was awesome!! On sunday we had a devotional by David A Bednar. It was just a talk he gave a while ago but it was so good. Unfourtunatly only missionaries can watch it though. But it basically talked about how if we love Christ that is why we should serve. He told us to study about christs life and how christ was the perfect example.He promised if we do this then we will recive blessings. So every morning i have been studying out of Jesus The Christ and learning more about Christ.

For our investigators sometimes its hard to know what to teach him. But pretty much every lesson we teach we recieve revelation on what to teach them. So for one of our fourth lesson with Maria we werent sure what to teach her. Shes commited to baptism and basically does everything we ask her to do. We were going to talk to her more about the plan of salvation but we were having a demonstration of teaching with the teacher before we taught Maria and i got the feeling that we should switch to Enduring to The end. So we did. when we got into the lesson she told us that her parents didnt want her to get baptized because they were catholics. So i told her that if she prayed god would tell her what to do. We then talked a little about enduring to the end. It talks about repentance and she asked what that was. So we told her about repentance and that she can recive a remmison of her sins. We asked her if she would pray about those two things and read Enos. We then asked her to give the closing prayer. She did and prayed for the things we asked her to pray about. During her prayer the spirit was soooo strong. She started crying and i was close but mangaed to hold back the tears. After the pray was over i told her this was the spirit and it was answering her prayers. She said she knew and it was an awesome experince. Its so cool to feel the spirit when you can barely understand what is being said. Its even more cool to not know what you are saying and literally are having words put into your mouth. Im not fluent in spanish and i proably sould like a three year old when i talk but God really does put words into my and i learned that today.

We also are teaching our other teacher. He is the exact oppisite of Maria. His name is Abraham. Its really hard to teach him because he says he doesnt know if God is real and is waitng for the BIG ANSWER. Its hard to teach someone to recive that when it took me 18 years to recieve! We keep telling him if he does what we tell him he will blessed to know its true. He however wont do any work. So I felt like he needed a lesson about Faith. We read the brother of jared with him and talked about faith. We told him that he needed to start exersing his faith in order to recieve an answer. Hopefully he starts doing the things we asked him. We will find out tonight. We have planned to teach the repentance tonight but that could change at any minute! We usually always change our plan according to what the spirit tells us to do.

This week has been amazing and strengthened my Testimony in so many ways. I know that the work here is possible it isnt going to be easy but it is possible. I know that peoples lives are going to be changed beacuse of us and that is our motivation to learn spanish. There is days i feel like i dont want to work and just lay in bed but thats not what god wants from us. One of the Elders gave us all an amazing poem that im going to try and send home to you guys. It talks about how christ has been through what we are going through and that through him we can be amazing missionaries. The work is real and i cant wait to get out into McAllen and tell everybody about it! I hope you are all doing amazing!

Love, Elder Hurst