September 24, 2018 (Week 51)

Pozole, flirt2convert, & en el medio del viaje…

Hey there everyone!  We had many great opportunities to find new ways to teach people better this week, the entire zone conference and the interviews were based on improving our teaching, and it was super nice to have each of the points we focused on in improving as a companionship we saw fulfilling needs in nearly every one of our appointments!

We´ve also had lots of success with the teenagers we are teaching from the ¨biker gang¨ many of them have lost focus and not kept the commitments, but two of them, Carlos and Marco, are really going against the trend and even though they had to give up many of their friends they have really chosen the right and will be baptized very soon!

We´ve also had some unexpected extra success with another one of our youth investigators, she had been learning very very fast and progressing when on Saturday she asked if she could bring her boyfriend to church with us.  We kind of rolled our eyes and said yes, but it turned out that Fernando her boyfriend, is very spiritual and progressed extremely fast at church and of all things was most interested in family history!  Flirt to convert does work!  (at least for now...)

Anyways, we´ve also found two previously unknown former investigators and each of them love to feed us their Pozole every time we stop by, which is very nice and filling the first few times, but to eat it two times a day is almost impossible!  Oh well, we´ll keep truckin´on!

-Elder Varney

Familia Rico de la rama, super awesome family!

Nuevo maca! (Special Hammocks made in Mexico)

September 17, 2018 (Week 50)

Hey there everyone!

This last week was pack full of miracles for us!  First off this "biker gang" of kids/teenagers tuned out to be super super great, we've been able to meet with all of them consistently every day of the week and they understand and believe almost everything very easily!  it all reached a peak when we brought seven of them with us to church, it was a great boost of energy to the branch!

In other news we may have found Forrest Gump, or perhaps one of the three Nephites.  There is a man named Ted who we always see just walking on the same street, he has a big beard and always wears the same baseball cap and jacket every day, and one day this week we saw him five different times at different hours of the day in completely different parts of the city!  Just another fun little quirk of this pueblito.

Anyways, thanks for all your prayers and thoughts, they help us out a ton down here!

-Elder Varney

Proclaiming the Gospel...  To the whole city!

September 10, 2018 (Week 49)

A house of prayer...

Another good time in el campo!  As a Bienvenida for my companion to the branch, the owner of the house of prayer where we hold the sacrament meetings told us we have one week to move out, so now the hunt is on to find a new house of prayer...  But I'm sure the Lord will provide, we simply need to exercise our faith.

In other good news we got in touch with the local biker gang, that is the local twelve year old biker gang.  We found two of them outside an investigator's house and they accepted the first contact we made with them, and when we met up with them the next night the two kids brought the rest of their crew, about eight kids in total, to "hear what god wants to tell us."

It was super sweet and they are all super interested and sincere, we were able to have two lessons with all of them two days in a row and they were all super excited about prayer, so it should be pretty sweet!

Thanks to all of you for exercising your faith in prayers, they are in action out here!

-Elder Varney

September 3, 2018 (Week 48)

Esperanza en la villa

This last week was pretty crazy, in a good way.  For the first time in a while, almost every day we got back home super tired, a good sign from all the awesome work we achieved.  We set a goal to find at least 20 new investigators, and in the end we were able to find many more than that, nearly every one with lots of potential.

In particular one day we were praying to find more hope (esperanza) as an attribute of Christ we were trying to develop, and that day we found a lady whose name is literally Esperanza!  The Lord is pretty ironic in his answers.  And it got better, because it turns out Esperanza has 20 children, 39 grandchildren, and at least 12 great grandchildren.  And we got nearly half of them from her as references.

Superb blessing and they have a ton of real intent in the gospel, so we really saw the lord raining down bendiciones on us!  The only trouble we are still having is getting people to church, it is still really hard for them to understand the concept of the commandment of the day of rest and to make the sacrifice to go to church, please pray for help with going to church so they can participate in the gospel!

Anyways, thanks so much to y'all and all your sacrifices and prayers for us out here, nos vemos!

-Elder Varney

Random art that Elder Varney found in his area

...More random art