A Miracle Find!

Love Huntington Beach!

Email from August 31, 2015

Hola mi familia!! How’s everyone doing this fine day?? Thanks again for the emails.  I love receiving them. From what everyone talked about it sounds like I missed a very stressful moving weekend getting all settled into the new house! I will say I am glad to not be home for that so sorry. Ha-ha. But I’m glad to hear that all is going well and everyone is healthy and happy.

As for me, I am doing good! I had a super hard week, but that’s normal to have at times. It’s not like I haven’t had one before, I just have to keep going like all the rest. We have been having to drop more investigators and also had a couple drop us which we thought had real potential.  We are pretty much left with nothing again and back to square one. A** is our bread and butter and is amazing! The most prepared 9 year old girl and will be baptized soon! We are planning with her mom for the middle of September since her husband who is anti baptism is starting to loosen up more and more so keep her in your prayers please.

Money found while out on the streets

Speaking of prayer, I would like to share an experience that I had this week with God answering my prayers. I had an experience that helped strengthen my testimony.  So I have a good friend Elder R** here in HB and he lent me his "SD" card to his camera because I wanted to copy some photos he had on it.  However, we went to a dinner appointment and then I ended up misplacing it that night. I assumed it had fallen out of my pocket.  I was a nervous wreck and felt horrible! Here I lost one of my good friends mission pics... well over 600 pics.  All I could think was wow, I am a horrible human being! So I decided to pray and pray and pray. Hoping that God would give me a “get out of jail free” card immediately.  Boy, I was wrong. For two days I kept on praying and hoping, but things were starting to look bleak and slim.   Friday afternoon came around and we went to the library to do mormon.org and midway through the session, I received a text from a woman in the Seapoint Ward.  She said, “Hello, I believe you dropped a SD card outside in the street by our home! WOW! I got it back by a pure miracle and was so glad that God heard and answered my prayers! Super cool.

So that was a good experience that happened to me!  We had a lot of hard ones by getting dropped by more investigators. One of which was M**.  We were making good progress with her, but then the second lesson she just says, “Hey guys, look I’m not gonna change and I just wanted to let you know”  We asked her what was going on and so she gave us this huge 10 minute lecture/excuses and then told is we could continue to talk to her??  I asked her if she had any intentions on ever taking our message to heart??    She said, “No” so we said alright.  We said goodbye and wished her luck with everything.   We are trying to find people to teach this week. Our potentials and formers are exhausted in our area book so it looks like we will just be finding by knocking or doing other methods. There is one method that worked for a good friend of mine.   He and his companion called on a ‘lost cat’ sign and when the woman answered and asked if they had her cat, they said, “No... But we do have a message for you about Jesus Christ and how he loves us and wants us to be happy.  She ended up having them come by. Ha-ha   We are going to have to try that.

Every penny adds up!

We have been making good progress with all the recent converts and less actives in the Pleasant View and Seapoint Wards.  It’s super hard covering four wards because we can’t be in all areas working at once and some areas have more Hispanic than others. Thus, we clearly spend more time there. But On Thursday, we had the bishop of the Pleasant View Ward come talk to us while we were at the church teaching a lesson. He told us of a family who has been less active for quite a while and he asked if we could go by.  When we received the address we were shocked because we had no idea that a family of members lived in the house that we go past all the time. So the next day we went by and contacted the mother. We had a good talk and then she broke down into tears and told us how her daughter is going through some hard trials and how she needs more spiritual help. She then asked us, after we shared a spiritual thought, what time church started and said she would come. However she didn’t, but we are hopefully for next week!

Church was good yesterday, Elder J** gave a really good talk on how companionship study affects us as missionaries and how we can do "comp study" as a family to strengthen the family. Of course I was translating the talk into Spanish.

But things will be better this week.  I hope to keep changing and learn how to be a better missionary/man. I hope all is well for everyone who reads this.  I love you all!! Have a great week!!

Elder Woffinden