Batia in Bocaue

Morning po.

This week was real.

We have been hitting a little bit of a wall with our investigators not going to church. Even some of them that have been going have problems that keep them from going consistently. Somewhere along the road, there is not much that we can do because they have their agency. Being two Americans, a lot of people listen to us; but only a select few choose to do anything with our message. It is sad to see people miss out on opportunities.

      

One of our biggest focuses in our mission right now is something called ITA, or Invitations To Act. The idea is to always be challenging people around you to change and to become closer to Christ. We are expected to make 30 different invitations every single day; these can be very small things like the invitation to listen to a message about Jesus Christ, or something large, like being baptized. Anytime that we give someone a specific chance to use their agency to become closer to God, we have successfully given an ITA. This really helps us to see who is progressing, who is keeping commitments, and where people are at in their repentance process.

     

We are thinking of dropping one of our farthest areas, Batia. With our usage of ITAs, we have seen that most of our investigators are not willing to keep even the small commitments. It is hard to see that in an area that was progressing before. It is quite far from the church. We have seen a few good investigators there, but they haven’t really been able to make it to church and see large effects of the gospel in their lives.

      

One of our investigators died, that was very sad.

Culture: Cooking. We made sopas. Sopas is a soup here in the Philippines; one of the only soups that they have. It has macaroni and some evaporated milk. Elder Bromley and I made it and it was really fun.

Tagalesson: The word "sana". The word "sana" means "hopefully". It can also be used to describe things that you want and are really too shy to be direct about. You can use it as like a hint, so they know what you want but aren’t too pressured into offending you if they don’t get it. A lot of people use it in prayers to ask things of God. I do not.

Welp That is pretty much all I got for you all this week. I will check up with you next week. Love you all.

Elder Faulkner