Saturday, January 24, 2015

The progress is slow, but worth the effort

Letter #72
January 12, 2015
Area: Trinity River
Companion: Gamez

I enjoy reading your letters, and I could say it was a good week for all of you because of the things you learned! :D It seems like it was a common theme of strengthening your personal testimonies of the simple things, like Carolyn and Angela with the daily scripture study. By the way, Carolyn, como te va la lectura del libro en Espanol con Ryan? Y a todas mis hermanas, estais vosotras estudiando o practicando vuestro Espanol? Actually thinking of "vosotros" form, in a lesson with the Chavez family this Wednesday, I had the awkward experience of "vosotros" just coming out because I have been reading the scriptures a lot in Spanish and we are basically family with them now, so the more familiar "vosotros" form just slipped out when I tried saying "when we were thinking of you...". I ended up saying "Cuando estabamos pensando en vosotros..." instead of "cuando estabamos pensando en ustedes..."

This week went well despite the lack of investigators we have. We still are working with the Chavez family and they are showing true desire and are progressing, but slower than before. The lack of progress was concerning us for a while, but as we pondered their situation, we realized that even though they haven't been able to make it to church recently, they still desire to move forward.  They have also been making steps forward in their Book of Mormon reading. As we re-evaluated their progress and situation, we came to the conclusion that we should try to help them 'see' their own progress by having one major goal per week and the smaller goals (or commitments) and helping them accomplish it through our visits. 
    Other than visiting the Chavez family, we have been putting forth the effort to contact more and to find more areas that are heavily populated by Hispanics. We actually had a good experience like that yesterday.  We had nothing to do and we had no idea who to visit, so when I just felt that we should just get out of the car and just contact and knock the street.  The street was that of a part-member family that we were going to visit about an hour later. We only contacted 3 people, but one of them ended up being a good referral for the West Lake Houston Elders. He was the only interested Hispanic person we found last week, but we feel like things will go really well with him and he will get baptized.

This next week we have the goal of getting back in with more of our less-active member families.  Again, most of them were on vacation, so now they have returned. Some of them show more desire to return to church, others don't show too much desire to return to church, but are excited to get their children involved in the activities.  We are going to work with them from there and help them come back at whatever pace they are willing to go.

I love you guys,
Elder Stanley Scott Dye

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