Elder Taylor

Monday, March 6, 2017

Muy Alto!

Hola Everyone!!

Hope everyone is doing well. We are having a great time here in San Antonio and Chamac and we feel so blessed by our Heavenly Father for the miracles we are seeing in our areas. This last week Mari attended again with her children, and this time her 17-year-old son, Robin, attended with them! We pushed their baptismal date to the 18th of this month because they wanted a little more time to prepare their baptismal service. This family is so PILAS. Mari has already downloaded LDS Gospel Library on her phone and she is teaching herself the hymns! I am so happy for this family. This will definitely be one of the most memorable convert-stories of my mission, especially since Chamac has been my most difficult area in the whole mission. It is amazing how the Lord prepares people to enter into his fold. The only thing my new companion and I are focused on now is strict obedience. Obedience brings so many blessings! 

My new companion is Elder Cook. He is from Mesa, Arizona and is super chill. We get along really well. He is very obedient, which I admire a lot. It is so much easier to get along with obedient missionaries. He is also way taller than me (6 ft. 5). It's funny because all of the people here in our area just stare at him. I don't think that they are very used to seeing tall white people. 😁 I also love that he is not afraid to talk to anyone! He talks with everybody in the street, even though he hasn't mastered the language. It's not common for new missionaries to be so outgoing in their first week! 

This month, as a mission we are focusing our studies on The Living Christ, so we are studying a lot about the Savior. I personally have been studying the beginning of 3 Nephi, where it speaks about the birth of Jesus Christ, and after, about the war between the Gadianton robbers and the Nefites. After the Nephites were able to protect their lands and people, many of them started to fall away from their beliefs and the church due to their pride. Pride is where all iniquity starts. We had an interesting class in Sunday School yesterday with the young men and young women in San Antonio. The teacher spoke about Moses and serpent on his staff. The question she asked was,¨Can Jesus Christ be compared to a serpent?¨ In the beginning all of the youth began to say 'no', obviously because of the common knowledge that a serpent is always comparable to the adversary. In this case, however, we learned that the serpent on the staff of Moses is a symbol of the sacrifice of our Savior, Jesus Christ. In this story, the people were suffering many sicknesses and trials, and Moses told them all they had to do was just look at the serpent. Many people looked, and were aleviated. However, a large portion of the people there were so prideful that they didn't even bother to just turn around and look. Even though it was a simple act, their pride brought upon them their own condemnation. 

I can't even imagine what it would have been like to have witnessed the signs of the birth of Jesus Christ and only about 30 years later be denying the church like the Nephites. Their pride grew so much that their judges and high priests began to secretly assasinatethe prophets when they called them to repentance. For lack of a better phrase, it just goes to show that seeing miracles doesn't persuade people if they don't have faith first. 

Let us all press forward in faith!

Elder Cook and me! 6'5 vs. 5'11
Heavenly Father loves us so much.

                                                                        I decorated a little for my new comp 😊  

                                                                    Here we are in an Internet café in San Pedro. In the moment! 

                                                                    Have a wonderful week. Jesus te ama!
                                                                    Elder Taylor

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