October 12, 2009

¡Hola Mamá!

Jeff has ben working mostly with the less active members of the ward he is in right. When I asked him why there were so many less-active members there this is what he said"

This week was good, kinda tough. We had a zona conference in
Melipilla, which is 2 hours away on a bus. So that was fun, it was a
good
conference. Then I had divisions with Elders in my district(all 6
of us
haha). I do a lot of divisions because Elder Mckay is the
District
Leader. We only had 34 people in sacrament yesterday.
It´s like
theres a disease spreading through out all of Chile, it´s called
lazyiness. In Chile, we have the same percent of active members as the
Catholics do here: 14% It´s sad. So this week the Bishop asked
us to
work with the less active and inactive families. He doesn´t have
any
counselors so we are his only help pretty much. So this week thats
what
we´ll be trying to do. It´s kinda depressing, we are suffering
the
consequences of the big baptising boom of the 80s and 90s. Yes,
many
people were baptized, but the majority of them didn´t actually have
testimonies.

I told Jeff that we have had an unusual fall season this year, that in October it was in the 30's for many days & that it had snowed already. The seasons in Chile are opposite what they are here, so he is in spring, approaching summer:

It´s finally starting to get warmer here, I´ll be very hot soon.

He had asked us to try & send him some additional music to listen to, and to try to get the cd of his high school choir singing 'Requeim '. His friend Peter Howard -who is currently serving in South Africa-was his roommate at BYU & had this cd:

You got the requiem CD! Awesome! I like that CD a lot. Peter and I would always listen to it at BYU. I can´t wait to get the CDs, gracias :) Don´t be afraid to put some goodies in the box too ;) Haha, theres good things here, but the sweets in America are just better lol. It´s true. Peter and I shoot each other little short emails every week so I know hes doing really well and enjoying Africa.

Oh, and our investigators who were supposed to get baptized are still not baptized, lol. Juancarlos has, well, problems with the Law of Chastity and we haven´t seen him in a while. And Rosa is still good to get baptized but shes been on vacation in the South for a week and a half now, so we haven´t seen her either. But shes back now so we are going to set a new date hopefully. We have about 4 other investigators who are progressing well too, so things are pretty good :)

Ok, well thats all for now. Thanks for everything and for writing every week :) It´s nice to hear from you and how you all are doing :) have patience and continue to be diligent in serving the Lord, He promises to bless us when we obey Him and He can´t lie :) Love you all and am praying for you!

Elder DeLong
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