Another wedding and another family!

Hola Everyone!

This week was a really special one. I´m not sure if I mentioned this before, but I began visiting a lady named Tatiana back with my old Zone Leader. She was living with her husband but they weren´t married. The husband is already a member of the church, and he had been waiting for her for a long time to go to church. When I first visited her, she was very nice. She let us sit down and teach a lesson to her. However, we could tell that she didn´t really like what we were teaching her, as she was Catholic. One time, we were able to find her when her husband was home and we commited her to go to church on Sunday. At that point she decided that she wanted to go to the ward that starts at 8 in the morning, which is a different ward than our assigned ward. After a few weeks of visits from the sister missionaries of the other ward, she and her husband made the choice to get married, and she accepted the challenge to be baptized in the church. It is amazing the change that we have seen in her. The day of her baptism she bore a wonderful testimony about the gospel of Jesus Christ and how grateful she was to be a part of it. 

On Friday, us missionaries helped with the wedding. It was very modest, but everyone was really happy for Tatiana and her husband. On Saturday, I was able to go to Tatiana´s baptism. I attached a picture of Tatiana and her family on the day of her baptism (Notice how happy she is). It is such a great feeling to see the happiness in an individual´s life when they find the answer to all of life´s questions. Up to this point, all of the people that have gotten baptized, that I have taught, are families or partial families. The mission has helped me see the strength and blessings of the family. Heavenly Father truly loves families, and I testify of this. 

Hopefully you all had a wonderful week, this week was pretty great for us here in Misión Retalhuleu. 

Have a blessed week!

Elder Taylor

Hungry Hungry Hippos and #Aleluya

Hola Everyone!

The weeks are flying by. I can´t believe how fast it feels like this month is going. Still going strong here in the office, and finding some new investigators every week. Although we haven´t had too many baptisms as of late, we are confident that the Lord will help us have one soon. I think that we are planting lots of seeds too. We have found some great people. 

This past week we were doing lots of activities to help motivate people to come to Ward Conference of Barrio Reu 2. On Tuesday there was a ¨Noche de Cine¨ (Movie Night). Tuesday was the Obra Misional activity (Missionary Activity). We decided to do life-size Hungry Hungry Hippos. Basically, what we did was split people into teams. The teams were based off of the tribes of Israel. They were Efraín (Ephraim), Manasés (Manasseh), and Judá (Judah). The object of this game was to grab as many balloons as possible. The way the players would accomplish this is by rolling around on four-wheel carts and grabbing them with laundry baskets. The rest of the team would then pull on a rope that was tied to the cart and pull back the player on the cart and the balloons they had grabbed. The game turned out to be a hit. It got really competetive. We had about 400 balloons on the floor. 

Hermana Galland
Hermana Canales(Mexico)
Elder Pugmire (Minnesota)
The spiritual element we tied into this game is that the players would represent missionaries, and that each balloon was one of the lost sheep. We based the whole game into the idea of the gathering of Israel in the Latter Days, and since it was an Missionary Work activity, it tied in perfectly. I think the members and investigators we had there enjoyed the game. We also wanted to do an activity that would help with team-building in the ward, so that hopefully the members could get to know each other better. 

Tajadas de banana verde con carne molida
Slices of green banana with ground beef
This week is Semana Santa, which is the week leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We´ve already started to see a little bit of what Semana Santa brings to Guatemala. The Catholic church is very active in doing processions and other public ceremonies. Things will be a little tough this week as everyone goes to the beach for holidays such as Christmas and Easter. The Church released their new incentive for Easter 2016 called #Hallelujah (#Aleluya en español). It´s always cool to see the new videos the church makes for the holidays. I especially enjoyed the video that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir did with a virtual choir on YouTube. They sang Handel´s ¨The Mesias¨ and it turned out awesome. I love that the church is constant with technology and reaches out to people through social media and music. It really makes you think; What other church compares to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? This is the only true and complete gospel that exists on the earth today. 

Anyways. I hope you all have a great Easter week and enjoy your Cadbury eggs! 

Elder Taylor

Still Here!

Hola Everyone!

Sorry for not writing last week. As usual, the excuse will be that we have been super duper busy in the office. :) 

First of all, I´d just like to give a shout out to my cousin Lauren and congratulate her on her mission call to London! I know she´s gonna be a great missionary, and that London is lucky!

Jugando (playing) gocha with Elder Lopez from Guatemala

Anyways, last week for P-Day, there were emergency transfers and we got way caught up in office work, so the only person I wrote was my mom, to let her know I was okay. I was gonna try to find time during the week to write, but I ended up just waiting till today. 

Paca shopping

Today we spent most of the day cleaning the house, doing laundry, getting haircuts, paca shopping, and mostly just errands. I´m really glad we finally had a normal P-day. One drawback of being in the office is how quickly we fall behind on chores because we are in the office so much. 

Hermana Chajchalac (Guatemala), Hermana Hernandez (Mexico), y mi compañero Elder Wilcox (California)

With Elder Cano de Honduras.

As far as the area, things are a bit difficult. We share our ward with a companionship of sister missionaries, Hermana Hernandez (Mexico) and Hermana Chajchalac (Guatemala). It´s awesome sharing an area and ward with them, and they support us and help us out a bunch. The biggest struggle we are seeing right now is that the area is really really small and that everyone is Catholic. It is especially difficult contacting during Easter time (Pascua/Semana Santa) here in Guatemala because the Catholic church does public displays and parades almost every day. 

Hermana Galland de California

This week we are going to have lots of activities in the ward since Ward Conference is coming up on Sunday. We got assigned to be in charge of Wednesday´s activity, so we´ve been planning some fun stuff to do. Hopefully everything turns out well and that we can animate the members to help us out with some more referrals. 

Anyways, hope you all have an amazing week! 

Elder John M Taylor

Guatemala Retalhuleu Mission

2015-2017

El cielo en Retalhuleu

Hoy! Its raining today

Hola Everyone! 

Hope your week was great. This week was just the usual. Lots of office work. Today we went paintballing as a zone which was really fun. Aside from that, everything is pretty normal. 

We are still working hard with the familia de oro that we have. They have lots of doubts. They have some Evangelicals in their family that are always putting doubts into their minds, so we have that to work with. We still have lots of faith though! The husband has been asking lots of questions about baptism and becoming a member of the church so that´s really good. The wife attended an Evangelical church and so she isn´t quite as curious about baptism, but we are still gonna help her out. 

Sorry for another short email. I´ll try to send some of the pictures of the paintballing we did today this week!

Have a great week!

Elder Taylor