Monday, September 20, 2010 Where's my glasses?

Hi Family!

It`s so good to know that you had such a good time at Lake Powell! I love Lake Powell!! Here in Argentina it`s starting to heat up.

Let`s see, what happened this week. This week was a pretty eventful week in the mission. Elder Quebbeman and I moved from the office pench to a different pench and waited outside the pench with all our luggage while we waited for the other Elders, Elder White and Elder Cardus, to come let us in and give us the keys. They are awesome! I am going to send photos next week of what we`ve been doing, what the pench is like and what the other Elders are like. Elder Cardus was an assistant and is in his last transfer of the mission and Elder White has 5 transfers in the mission. Elder White is from St. George Utah and Elder Cardus is from Buenos Aires and was living in Spain just before he came on the mission. Elder Quebbeman, my companion, I don`t remember if I`ve ever told you about him. He`s from Oregon and grew up on a farm. He has spend lots of time out in the fields and knows how to work hard.

This week we`ve been working a little bit with Hugo. It`s a little disappointing. He`s not very committed to changing. We keep going by and he keeps saying that we should come Wednesday and that he likes to talk. We`ll keep coming by Wednesday and I pray that he can find the desire to change.

We did find an incredible family that accepted a baptismal date for October 2. It was incredible. We said in the lesson, if you knew this was the true church, would you get baptized. Claudia, the wife and the husband, Marcos, said yeah for sure. They didn`t make it to church on Sunday so we`ll have to move their baptismal date back but I am excited to work with them. Caludia told us the wonderful story about how in the past she and her husband didn`t want anything to do with religion and things were going really bad for her and her husband. It came to the point where she did not have a place to live and slept in the plaza for a night. She was in desperation and at the very end of her rope. She just laid down and prayed to God that help would come. Just when she did at that moment her husband came up to her in the park and said, "honey, I found us a place to live." It was incredible, they started going to back to the catholic and started to change their life. She says that she feels that God has something big planned for her. I told her that yes God did have something big prepared for her. Their two kids Niko and Emmanual are awesome. We had a good time playing with them and their dogs while we waitied for their parents to get home one day. One of their dogs just had puppies that are about 3 days old and haven`t even opened up their eyes yet. It was so cute!

We are working with Sebastian and Rodrigo(his younger cousin) as well. I have a funny story about this. When we were teaching Sebastian and Rodrigo. I had the hardest time remembering his name. I kept calling him Roberto or Alberto. So I told him to keep my glasses and then at church on Sunday I had to tell him his name correctly before I could have my glasses back. I spent the rest of the day working without my glasses, which was pretty funny. But Sebastian and Rodrigo are awesome, Sebastian has a lot of true questions and is really pondering about the Book of Mormon.

We`re also working with the Paez family, that family of 9 I mentioned last week. The mom is an incredible mother and has done an incredible job with raising her family. It`s going to be difficult to get them to church but we`ll do what we can to help them to get there.

I learned this week about patience, about how we need to be patient with ourselves and others in our mutual weaknesses. Perfection does not come all at once. But when the desires of our hearts are denied or delayed, we have ot have faith and trust in the Lord that things will happen in the proper and right time as we strive for the goal of Eternal Life.

I love all of you! Have an awesome week!

Love,
Elder Hoglund