Wow, magic.

I am here and still alive, and it looks like we will be making it into the rainy season very soon. Hopefully that means we won’t have to endure the heat for too much longer. Don’t get me wrong, it is still going to be really hot, but it will cool off while the rain is going on.

This week we focused almost exclusively on mapping, so we didn’t get many lessons. We went to and mapped around 120 different households. It was fun to be able to know every single member in our area. This coming week, we will be doing the same thing in the other half of our branch to have the entire map updated. 

         

We have taught very few people this week and I look forward to getting back to regular missionary work after all this stuff is taken care of. But for now, you have to just go on with what you are called to do.

       

There is a lot going on right now, but I have learned well to only focus on one main task at a time; it makes my time a lot more productive. I have learned a lot of organizational skills while on my mission – which is probably the biggest miracle of all (as I am usually not a very effective person).

     

I will story to you now about a family that we are teaching. The Papa family. We found these two girls through their father, who is a decently active member. The two girls, Aileen and Erika, were taught before – but then they got very busy with their schedules at school. We have been teaching Aileen for about 3 weeks now and Erika for just about a week. This last Sunday, they both came to church together. It is nice to see their testimonies grow steadily as we teach them and read the Book of Mormon with them. This is one of those families that we just kind of stumbled along at the right time and we were able to teach them again and again. They have accepted baptismal dates in the month of May and we will hopefully be working very closely with their father to help them go to church every week and to read the Book of Mormon.

       

We focus a lot on individual prayer. People who are struggling with other things in their lives have forgotten to pray, losing that small consistent, connection with God. Through prayer and their scripture study, we were able to help 2 families back to church.

Here comes the invitation to all of you: Make your prayers more sincere or make your prayers happen more often. 

Just these simple things allow our lives to change. One person that we are teaching said that she saw a huge change in how people at her house treated each other – just because she went from praying 1 time in two weeks to every day. When we give consistent love and respect to God, He fixes our problems (or at least gives us the direction we need).

Well, I love you all.

Thank you muchly for your reading of my letters. Keep on keeping on

Elder Faulkner