June 3, 2013

Family! 

Good morning! I hope you all had a good week. It´s been a pretty good week for us. Elder Stephens and I are getting a lot more work going on here, but we´re having a hard time finding new people to teach. Which is what we need most of all. But the investigators we do have are doing really well, so things are good.

This week we set 2 baptismal dates for the 15th of June with Belén and with Mayte! Super cool! Belén is doing great. She has started reading in the Book of Mormon and is praying to know if it´s true. She says if she feels it is right by the 15th she will get baptized. I´m almost positive she will. I don´t remember if I´ve told you anything about Mayte before, so here´s a quick profile. She is 16, has been investigating for about a year and is amazing! She does everything! She comes to church every week, by herself, goes to mutual every Thursday, reads the BoM every night, everything! She is even going to EFY! But she hasn´t been baptized. So we had a really awesome lesson with her and José Montoya, who was one of my teachers in the MTC. The truth is he really taught the lesson and we just followed along. He did an awesome job! We repassed the Restoration and found out that she has a doubt about Joseph Smith. She said she is not sure if he was a prophet. We committed her to pray about it and promised that she would get an answer. We also talked about the importance of having goals, and she agreed to set the 15th as a goal to be baptized. She also has to get permission from her parents, which could be hard for her. Her father wants nothing to do with the church and her mom used to be an investigator, but got hung up on Joseph Smith, which might explain some of Mayte´s problem. But we challenged her to talk to them and we are doing everything we can to keep her excited. I really, really hope everything goes well. She is such a good person and it´s obvious the church means a lot to her. One time she told us that her friends were mad at her because she wouldn´t come with them to do the kinds of things they used to do together. She has definitely changed and the gospel means enough to her that she is living it. She is so ready for baptism. 

Those were the 2 big highlights for the week. Other than that we have been in the street talking with people a lot more. We have gotten some really good references, people who seem to have a lot of potential (one guy told us after talking to him that he had been a little bit down in the dumps, but that we had helped him feel a lot better. We told that was why we are here), but we haven´t managed to meet with any of them yet. This month has been designated the moth of invitation by the area presidency, so we are really focusing on inviting people to church. We have put together a good lesson about "feed my sheep" using the story from the Bible and the talk by Elder Holland 2 conferences ago to help get members sharing the gospel with their friends. Elder Stephens drew some sheep to give to each person. We want them to think of one specific person to share their testimony with or invite to church and then write that person´s name on the back of their sheep. We created a calender with ideas of how to share the gospel and the challenge to write what day they are going to talk to their sheep. It´s been really good teaching it to people (Elder Stephens and I teach really well together) and this week hopefully we´ll see some results. 

The office has really taken a backseat to our missionary work, which is great! It still keeps us busy, but now it´s more of something we do in addition to being missionaries instead of the other way around. We really have an awesome area here and I want to make the most of it. 

Thank you for praying for the people we teach and for me. I honestly know it makes a difference. And feeling the Spirit is the most important thing. For the people we teach and for me. I had a really good personal study this week reading in 1st Peter and in a talk from Elder Bednar from the last Conference. It was all about how the body and the spirit (our spirits) are always fighting each other, always in opposition. The natural man is an enemy to God, while our spirits want to follow Him and His Spirit. The good thing is that our spirit is more powerful. It is an eternal being fighting against a fallen creation. We can always overcome the desires of the body and the natural man if we choose to follow the spirit.

Haha, sorry I forgot to tell that story [about why I'm the designated driver] after all. Basically, I was in exchanges in Alcalá and Elder Stephens tried to come pick me up. But he got on going towards Madrid (the opposite direction he needed to go), got totally lost, and killed the car a lot of times. Finally he just gave up and called the other elders to come and get him and then get me. It was a long night and now it´s just generally assumed that I drive.

Well, that's about it for today. Thanks for everything you do, especially for your prayers. I couldn´t do this without all your support and love. Thanks again. I love you!!

Elder Cousins