Week 51 in Paraguay Change 9 Week 2

So today was the first real relaxed P-day I have had in a long time, and I think my phone only rang about twice today, so that is really nice. Today was a great day, we started off with our studies like normal and then at 10am we went to Cocodrilo, this gym we have memberships at. I don’t know if I had mentioned that before. There is this nice gym really close to our house here so we asked our President if we could start going there and he said yes. It is so nice, we go every morning at
6:00am and workout, lifting and stuff, until 6:30am, then we go upstairs to this soccer gym they have and play soccer until 7:00am when we have to go home. It has gotten me in really good shape, hopefully I won’t lose it all again once I get back out into the field. So today, we went to the gym at 10am and played soccer solid until about 1:30pm, it was awesome, really tiring but awesome. It has been so much fun being able to play soccer so much here, I think I’m getting better too. I guess we’ll really see that one once I get home. Anyway, after that we went home, all took showers, and then took a nice little nap until about 3:00pm, got ready to leave and ate lunch and now we are just kind of finishing off the day with emails and things in the office. The Assistants have a baptism today, so they are steady working on that, the rest of us are at the computers. Anyway, work this week has been really hard, we had another sick Elder in the office so one of us had to stay with him all week, so we were pretty much working 3 areas with 2 companionships, and to make it worse those 3 areas used to be 4 areas, but one was just recently closed. Our areas are a lot bigger now, on top of that Elder Payne had to send in all the baptismal records for October 2 days earlier than usual, so we were in the office pretty late all week to begin with, so the area hasn’t really even seen too much of missionaries lately. We found this really great new investigator last Sunday too, and I really wanted to be able to meet with her this week, but we haven’t been able to stop by her house when she was home and she hasn’t picked up the phone the few times I’ve tried to call. Hopefully we can get a hold of her today and maybe by some miracle she will get to church tomorrow. Things with Laura’s family haven’t been too great lately either, the last time we went over there we were trying to figure a lot of things out, I really just wanted to get a feeling for where they were at spiritually with prayer and receiving answers, and then she told us she doesn’t think Joseph Smith could have been a true prophet because of what happened with polygamy. She always tells us that she goes on the internet to learn more about the church, but as much as it had sounded she was only going to Mormon.org to get information, but it really sounded like she got a hold of some anti literature or something. It has really caused me though to look a whole lot into the subject, I had no idea how much of it was explained in Doctrine and Covenants, and it has actually strengthened my testimony a lot about the subject studying about it and why it had to happen, today I did a study pretty much to answer the questions that she has about it all, I mean I was able to answer them with her, but I felt really bad about it because I didn’t have anything in scripture to back me up, so I studied a lot about it today and found some really good things I think might help her. I really think there is something a little more than that behind it all though, she doesn’t believe in the apostasy, she can’t believe the fact that no one had the authority for such a long time if the apostles left and passed on the authority to baptize to people, she is kind of offended by the whole temple ceremony and how we make covenants we can’t talk about, she always says that if Jesus loves us so much, why would the covenants be such a secret, but the amazing part behind all of it is that she is constantly reading and praying to know if it is true. She has read almost the whole Book of Mormon, parts of the Doctrine and Covenants, all of Our Heritage, most of the teachings of the prophet Wilford Woodruff, and a lot of the teachings of the prophet Spencer W Kimball, and she tells us every day she is praying to know if the things they say are true, but she kind of already can’t believe that they are. Fatima has been doing better, she told us the other day that she thought the Book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but that was before the whole polygamy lesson happened, hopefully that didn’t shake her at all, but she tells us she just doesn’t feel the need to be baptized yet. It is really nice to teach them because they really understand what we are teaching, but they just can’t say yet they know it’s true. I think we have basically decided that we are just going to go over there to teach and help Laura stay active for a while, and really focus on her instead of getting the rest baptized, and hopefully she will be able to help the rest of the family that’s not there. Anyway that is about it for now, we are going to have to leave now, I love you all so much! Thank you for all the emails, love you tons, Elder Adamson V