11/4/2024 - Week 68 - Spooky Season

Feliz dia de los muertos!

Well, this week felt like a long time, but that's because we were getting a ton of work done, so you won't see me complaining about that!

We had 2 lessons with our friends on Date Rodbim and Wayner! We actually could only teach Rodbim the first lesson and we talked about Prophets and their importance as well as the law of tithing which he was surprisingly down for! Unfortunately, when we came by 2 days later to teach (basically) the same thing to Wayner, they had a sudden change of heart and are less sure about it and they were saying some weird stuff and not making a ton of sense. So we'll probably have to move their baptismal date back a couple of weeks and we'll be working extra hard to help them develop a testimony (because that's the most important part right?)

We were able to meet with the Hernandez family as well a couple times this week and we finished up talking about that Plan of Salvation and also taught them about the importance of Prophets and tithing, but those lessons went great! They always comment about how much they love that the Book of Mormon and the Bible go hand in hand and they absolutely love to keep the commitments we extend to them (a very rare thing) so they are progressing really well and we will probably move their baptismal date up a little bit!

We also found a family of 8 this week because the mom sent in a referral and we contacted them and she said she wants her family to find a church and learn about the Gospel together so they can find peace in their life! We're super exited to meet with them and help them to achieve this goal of theirs! We're actually gonna meet with them today so that will be awesome!

Service Update! We do service every week at a tienda here called Mi Tierra and pretty much all of the workers speak a Dialect (pretty much think of it as an ancient language that shouldn't exist anymore) of Guatemala. (there are a ton of people like this throughout our area) So we've been learning some Ixil (one of these dialects) because we're pretty sure more people speak Ixil in the greater Cincinnati region than there are in Guatemala. One of the Guatemaltecos really wanted to make a TikTok with us so we did end up making one of us using our Ixil skills! We also ended up getting some chill hats from the boss there!

I had a catholic Guatemalteco try and bash me using math (really weird and bad idea in my book) and it didn't go well for him because I happen to know a thing or two about math, and he was also not making sense with what he was saying about math. Stay in school kids!

On Halloween, not much happened. We weren't allowed to pross from 6-9pm so we did a little Kahoot and had a devotional about the Historic Church Sites in Ohio!

We went to a Dia de Los Muertos party with the massive family that has a few members that I was talking about last week and we had some great food (tamales, posole, pan dulce, the works) and got to see some really cool costumes (clasico esqueletos de Mexico!) and some incredibly inapropriate ones too 🫤. 

At church, sadly none of our friends on date were able to make it, but we did have the massive family pull up, so in the end we had 10 friends show up! We also had one really questionable testimony given and it was in the middle so hopefully they just forgot about it! We also watched the new church video about Mormon 1-7,12-13 (I'm giving those chapters from memory so they're probably wrong, but it's the only video about Mormon) and it was awesome to watch that with our friends to help them understand what the Book of Mormon is and how it teaches of Jesus Christ! 

Spiritual thought! 

Elder Bednar gave a devotional last night about the power of technology called "Things as they really are 2.0" and I know my dad was telling me about how excited he was for this, so luckily for him, it was amazing! My favorite insight from the devotional was about Satan's rebellion. We know that God proposed the Plan of Salvation, the path that allows us to return to Him by passing through this life and choosing to learn how to walk by faith in all things, using our agency to choose to do good and avoid evil. We also know that Satan rejected that plan and proposed that we be stripped of our agency and forced to be objects which are acted upon, which do not act. Satan to this day is still trying to get us to give up our agency though a litany of different sources: drugs, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, the works. But he is also trying to get us to give up our agency in much smaller and meticulous methods, like the use of technology. Elder Bednar encourages us to use technology righteously and to use it as a tool to further the purposes of God. Technology in and of itself is neither good nor bad, it has the possibility to do both. What we need to understand is that the machines we use can only thing carnally, and if we put too much reliance on them, we will fall to their level of carnal thinking. Remember that God holds the power and knowledge of all proof. Turn to God for the questions of significance and don't put Google before God!

That was realllllly long and rambly, so hopefully you understand the message in there!

Chao!
-Parker









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