Elder Benjamin Sierra's Missionary Blog

GREAT NEW CONTACTS, CRAZY COINCIDENCES AND LIGHTENING STRIKES TWICE IN THE SAME PLACE!!

October 11, 2017

Dear Family and Friends,

This week, the work's been rolling along lot better. We've been finding some new people but haven't been able to teach our new family again. We're going to do a service for them tomorrow so maybe we'll get a chance to teach them then. We've found a couple more Haitians and have another 2 in our teaching pool that are doing great as of right now, but we were only able to teach them twice. In all, we have roughly 3 groups of people, making 8 individuals in total, that are ready for a baptismal date and that have already accepted a baptismal invitation, so "SE SUPONE" that things are gonna REALLY get rolling this weekend because we have appointments with all of them. 

One of them is Silvia Arraya. She's an AWESOME reference we got from Denver, Colorado. She has a Chilean friend there that introduced her to the Church. Silvia's around 50ish and really cool. We called her the day after getting the reference to see when we could meet and she was like, "OH MY GOODNESS! I LOST ALL HOPE OF SEEING YOU GUYS!" and I was like, "Why? it's only been a day" and she was said, "No, I've been waiting for months!" What?! Well, we planned a date to see her and taught her yesterday. It was one of the best first lessons in my mission and she was very happy to see it. She said she wanted to have a church, a place to direct her faith, but didn't like any of the ones she had visited before. She loved hearing the message of the Restoration and is excited to read the Book of Mormon. She really just understood everything very well and had some great questions. 

Super neat story: On Sunday, we had nothing to do for 3 hours and so we were going from park to park, plaza to plaza talking to everyone we saw. NOBODY wanted anything until we got to this one guy smoking a joint, Fabio. He was the nicest flippin' dude we had talked to that entire day and we had a very good contact! He said he was from a different part of town and was with his mom for the day. When we were about done talking to him we asked him if his mom would be interested in our message as well and he was like, "Maybe". We asked for her name and he's said "Silvia"..."¿Silvia Arraya?" "Sí" and we were like no way! We already know her! He was like, oh neat. It was pretty cool. Fabio wants to stop smoking weed and be an airline pilot. We sent his reference to his respective sector. 

One last story: 

We were walking with an investigator to an FHE (Family Home Evening) and we were with our bikes, but walking. This sketchy dude comes up, my comp says hi to him. The dude seems normal and walks towards my comp and so I keep talking to my investigator. Then I didn't realize he had started walking back towards me. With one hand he grabs my bike and with the other he points a knife towards me and says "*bad word* give me your bike", then takes it and rides off.... And you know what the sad part is? IT WAS THE SAME GUY WHO ROBBED ME LAST TIME... WITH THE SAME FLIPPIN KITCHEN KNIFE! 

NOT COOL

So, right now, we're bikeless which is kinda hard but really not that bad. 

We were able to have a good day yesterday anyway so, yeah. 

It was a good week. I hope you all have a good one! Chao!

-Elder Sierra