week three

i´ll start with a week ago from saturday. We´re able to baptize 8 people! i baptized two and it was super awesome. I was so excited that i got the prayer right that i think i dunked them with a little too much authority and they got water in their ears! oh well we believe in baptism by total immersion and nobody can say they werent! It feels great to be an instrument in the Lords hand 24/7. I knew that is what i was in the MTC but i can feel it alot more here. I´m a self sharping kind of tool (and when i say tool i mean sword of course) and the extent of my effectivness is based upon the abiblity and level that i have pushed myself to. So i just got to keep pushing myself to new levels and be ready for the Lord to use me as He see´s fit. This past has been alot of teaching because last sat. we baptizied everyone that we had in our pool who was close to baptism so we taught alot so we could prepare more of our investigators for baptism this week. Elder Moran is a bit trunky seeing as this is his last week and it´s rather hard to take the reins when you can´t really speak the language but i find ways to keep him on his toes. One is when i feel like we´re wasting time i contact the next person we see and so then he has to come in and say something, or i get him talking about his glory days and that fires him up and we get moving. He´s great though, he´s a really good teacher and knows what he´s talking about. Matthew last week you gave me some advice about bearing my testimony and playing the gringo greenie card. So this past week i made a goal that whenever i opened my mouth in a lesson or contact to not close it until i bore my testimony. It was great too see people listen to my testimony and understand what i was saying (because i practiced and made it fancier than ¨YO SE QUE¨). And i love the section about bearing testimony in PMG in the chapter about commitments. When you share a scripture, explain a little, and then bear testimony the spirit comes really strong and i love it (that´s my goal for this week, after i finish my section scrip/ explain/ testify). I also love the greenie card because everyone thinks i´m hiliarious and you know how i am with that. Sunday (in which i gave a talk about tithing and they didn´t have the cd´s to sing with so it was even worse than normal, i timed the opening hymn and it took 10 mins to sing it 10!!) some primary kids were teaching me about foods and they were talking about plantones which sounds like pantalones so i just kept saying pantalones and i was probably the funniest thing ever to walk the face of Colombia. Pretty sure i said i like to eat fried pants and it was a crowd killer. also i use the gringo bit when we contact because i pretend i cant understand them when they say no and then testify again and ask if we can come by and teach, i can usually get away with doing that 2 or 3 times and sometimes they let us come back and teach after the 3rd time. It´s a little frusturating not being able to help and get to know these people as much as i would like but the upside is i get to learn humility and patience (i thought i learned patience in the MTC). I´m trying to find how i can be most effective now because it makes me scared to think that i´m not as an effective tool (big and sharp espada) as i can be. One crazy investigator that is a blessing for sure is this new yorker colombian 40 year old man who i teach in english. It´s crazy how the lord puts people in your path and talk about putting people in your path. He is a retired cook who got sick of the fast life and moved to colombia to cook burgers, REAL ONES, in the park. so we teach him and eat his burgers and it´s loco, the only sad thing is that this week i might leave puerto (it´s cambios) so i´m not sure what will happen to him. But i was able to get him a Book of mormon in english and he reads it alot. i´ll end talking about the buses here which are also loco. about once or twice a week E. moran and i go into Barr. for meetings and take these crazy buses. Basically anything that seats more than 10 people counts as a bus, my favorite are the ones that are like the school buses back home, the ones matthew would leave his trombone on. They take all the windows out (there are a few air conditioned ones but they cost more so we dont take those) and they paint them street racer style and put huge decals on them. Then they decorate the inside with virgins and stuffed animals hanging from the sealing, or tons of colombian flags. They drive these rattly, rickety buses like race cars and it´s the best when they are packed, i´m the only gringo on the bus and we all get bumped into eachother and they blast some bianato music (the stuff with the accordian). I almost feel native but then i either have to look straight down to someone or i see me reflection and know i´m a gringo. it´s great and i love it, we´re working hard to get a couple married so that they can be baptizied that thats our goal.
love you and thanks for your prayers i feel them.
Elder Larson