Staying in Cuenca!

Dear Family,

How is every one?  The new house doesn’t look any smaller or less Xanadu than the last one.

Well, today was transfers and it looks like I’ll be staying in Cuenca.  Everyone is staying here in our house except for Elder Warner.  He’s going to Monay.  We had a trip down to Machala to have a meeting with Presidente Montalti.  I guess the mission got pretty lazy this past month.  We all dropped in numbers.  I am rather proud of myself because this week we did really good working with members.  Elder Castro and I beat our record for number of lessons with a member present in a week for this area and we even were gone two whole days.  

We’ve been trying to help this family who knows the Book of Mormon is true but doesn’t want to pray to God about it.  We got the members excited about the family and they have all been trying to help, but I am afraid the family doesn’t want to progress.  The dad said that he really likes everything we have taught him from the Book of Mormon and even wants to go teach his friends using the Book of Mormon but said that he made the decision long ago to never join another church.  I think he’s talked with and investigated a lot of churches.  He said all the churches lead to Christ.  Apparently prophetic revelation, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and a remission of sins is not all that important to him.  I told him if he wants to walk away with the Book of Mormon but not join the church, its basically the same thing as stealing a bunch of cable channels from his neighbor.  I am not sure how he took it.

One of the big things I took home from the Machala conference is we need to always have a prayer in our heart.  Everything we do should be in a spirit of prayer.  If we do that, it will be a lot easier to stay focused on what is really important and we can know what we need to do.  We are still teaching the girl from Machala that I told you about last week.  There are two sets of senior missionaries here in Cuenca called the LaMarcas. They have been teaching English classes and our investigator has been going there with her friend, Yuliana.  The LaMarcas called and asked if they can come and teach her with us.  They are really good.  They still need me to translate, but they add a level of maturity to the lessons that Elder Castro and I are not quite capable of.

Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll get to learn what you’ve been up to.  How long did it take you to find the house?

Love,

Elder Ludlam