Un Regalo de Dios

{A gift from God}

Transfers are this week and Hermana Pastillo and I are staying together in Jaihuayco, Cochabamba! This really is a gift from God. We have been working so hard and so well together! In one transfer more we are going to see so many more miracles!


{The fight is daily}




{seeing her old companion Hermana Cardoza}

This week, every morning I woke up with new giant bug bites on my legs or hands, so I finally decided to take off all the sheets and blankets from my bed and shake them out. When I did, a nice quarter-sized spider went crawling away.=)  Solved that, but I still itch all over!

Other than that we had a baptism this week! Our investigator Nataly got baptized by her brother who served a mission in Chile. She is an amazing single mother we have been teaching for a while, and she is already acting like a member. She is going to be such a strength for her family too!

We were supposed to have two baptisms, but the night of the baptismal interview he texted us and told us he wouldn't be able to make it. Then we passed by his house and he told us he didn't think he was going to be baptized. That shocked us a ton, but when we asked why he said he didn't feel like he could live in harmony with the rules of the church. But we immediately knew that was just the adversary working with him. We talked with him for a while about the atonement and that nobody is perfect, but that we need to do our best when we know the will of God. We told him the best thing to do was pray to know a specific date in which he should get baptized. Then Sunday came and he pulled us aside after sacrament meeting that he prayed about a date and he got an answer that he should be baptized October 7!

I know God has a plan for everyone! I know God has his timetable, and we just have to be willing to follow it. Now that Jerardo has chosen his baptismal date for himself, he will be more confident in his decision to get baptized. 

I absolutely love the mission, I can't wait for General Conference, and to find more people! I know they are waiting for me. I just need to be brave enough to go find them=)


{Playing Ironman & Batman with this little boy's toys}

Fun Facts:

-In Bolivia the Day of Love and Friendship (AKA Valentines Day) is on September 21. The way they celebrate is how we celebrate Halloween. They dress up how people dress up for Día de los Muertos (which is a little different than Halloween) and they go marching in the streets, they buy lots of presents and sweets for their boyfriends or girlfriends.

-If you don't have a smartphone here, you have the same little brick phone, and therefore the same ringtone. So when one cellphone starts ringing, everyone starts looking to see if it is theirs haha!

-- Don't count the days, make the days count!

~Hermana Madsen

¡8 meses! ¡Todavía no estoy trunky!

{8 Months! And I'm still not trunky!}

Woohoo! 8 months down!

First off, a shoutout to my friend Victor who reads my blog! Que nunca olvide quien le ha puesto aquí, ni las personas que le traen más cerca de Dios. Él es todo, y le escucha cada vez que le hable. Digale todo y escuchele bien. Le contestará=)

Have you ever felt like there was a hole in your chest that you just couldn't fill? This week I felt that. I wasn't upset, I just couldn't fill a need I had. We had a great zone conference and interviews with the mission president, but nothing seemed to fill this emptiness that I felt. Then I remembered times when I felt like this before. It was always before General Conference. I know I need to be even stronger against the adversary when Conference is getting close because it is a special time that we get to listen to our church leaders and we receive instruction from God! 

¡Preparense! Prepare yourselves! This is gonna be a good one!

Other than that, this week was very successful! One day we were walking looking for people to contact, and we saw this girl walking around crying, and decided to ask her if there was anything we could do to help her. Turns out her four year old daughter had disappeared. She had been playing outside, and her mom realized that she didn't hear her little girl outside anymore. We wrote down her number and said we would go looking. Then I had the impression to say a prayer with them. They accepted the offer, and we prayed with them that her daughter would be safe, and they could find her. We looked the rest of the afternoon with them, but didn't find her.

We went back a few days later and the little girl was there! She was taken in the middle of the day by a woman who thought the little girl had a big wad of cash in her pocket, but they were play-bills. Like monopoly bills....ugh! She took her across Cochabamba and when she realized they weren't real, she took her to the police station because she didn't want to deal with a screaming little girl. 

But the point of this story is that when we went back we were able to teach the power of prayer and the power of God. The mom has a baptismal date now=)))))

I know God is watching over us, not passively, rather intensely. He knows you. He knows me. He wants us all to come to Him, and although I still have fear sometimes of people here, I know my purpose here is to bring all of them that I can unto God. 

Fun Facts:

-In spanish the word for sweatshirt is buso. But here in Bolivia they use it for church slacks. So when my companion told our convert to take off his "buso" he was very confused.

-For those of you who don't know, there is a giant christ statue here in Cochabamba that is even bigger than the one in Rio=)

 -- Don't count the days, make the days count!

~Hermana Madsen

Son pobres, no tienen dinero para faldas largas

The title this week comes from a lesson on modesty we heard in Young Womens. The teacher said that whenever she sees girls with mini skirts, she explains to her little daughters that those girls don't have enough money to buy longer skirts... jajajaja














{baptism of Miranda's investigator after she transferred}

Um so something changed this week. I don't know why, I don't know how, but we are so much closer to God and seeing miracles I never dreamed of. It started on Tuesday when we were planning a baptism of one of our investigators named Jorge. He wants to get baptized super bad, and we were going to have to postpone his baptism for another week because of some activities and meetings in the church. But he didn't want to, so we put the date for Wednesday in the evening. But during lunch on Tuesday all of a sudden I felt something I have never felt before. It was a worried, rushed sort of feeling. Like when you need to be somewhere but your ride is late. I told my companion that I was feeling weird and she said she was feeling exactly the same. That's when we knew that something was wrong with Jorge. Ive never before experienced knowing something before it happened like that. So we called and canceled everything on a whim, and when we did we felt calm and peaceful. When we did a pre-interview with him, we found out he was still missing a key part of testimony. And I can't believe I felt it first!

Then my companion started dreaming.

Hermana Pastillo has a gift.  She dreams and receives revelations for things that are going to happen. One incredible dream she had was that we were visiting her family in Ecuador and her brother gave us some counsel for the mission that really we were special servants of God and that we had to keep pressing forward and that our work was very important to God. That we should never give up even though the devil is super strong and will work his hardest to get us down. He said a lot more, but that is what is important. Because that night we were walking around and contacting and eating popcorn when a Brazilian man came up to us and asked if we were missionaries. We said yes! He told us he had met some missionaries in Brazil and was here to study, and that he just needed to tell us something. He began to tell us that our work was very important to God and that he was very happy with what we are doing here, helping people. He said that we need to be careful because the devil is super strong and will do what he can to prevent our progress and our work. 

In that moment I started crying, and I looked over at Hermana Pastillo and she had tears in her eyes too. He appeared out of nowhere and felt like he should tell us those exact words. We have had more experiences just like this during the week where people have told us EXACTLY what Hermana Pastillo heard in her dreams. And it is CRAZY!

THEN we had an amazing night with our convert Limber and his mom, Gloria. She gave us another miracle on Sunday because we were waiting for someone to show up to church because all of our investigators were failing us, and we were calling around like crazy. Then she, her mom, and her twin grand daughters showed up! She told us that night that so many things they said interested her.  She was super interested in baptisms for the dead so we got the help of her son, who is preparing for a mission to help us teach her. At the end of the lesson she said she knew she would get baptized someday but that it would be a surprise to us when. I have a lot of hope for her whole family. Even if it takes years, I know they will all come to accept the gospel.

Well this has been long, and I didn't even tell the half of my week! So if you wanna know more you'll just have to ask me after the mish!

Love you all!

Fun Facts:

-You know that Brazilian guy who told us that revelation? He told me he was in love with me. That I seemed like I was from another planet, he couldn't explain it. haha!

- The limes and lemons are backwards here. The limes are big and yellow on the outside, and the lemons are small and green.

 

 

{Be Happy}

-- Don't count the days, make the days count!

~Hermana Madsen