Hola todos,
The time is just going by so quickly now. It’s true what they say that after passing the one-year mark in the mission the time starts to slip away so fast. The weeks seem like days! This week I completed one year in Chile (14 months in the mission). It´s pretty crazy! We´re having our P-day today instead because of General Conference tomorrow. I´m not going to lie, I am SO excited for General Conference!!! I´ve heard missionaries say that General Conference is like the Super Bowl for missionaries. I´ve never really cared about the whole Super Bowl thing, but I understand the concept and it´s so true!
We had an excellent lesson last night with a wonderful family. I don´t know if I´ve talked about them before, their names are Jony and Naty and their two daughters Alexia and Alixa. They are from Peru and unfortunately Jony and Naty aren´t married. We found them a long time ago, back in my first change in the office. We started to visit them and Jony was anxious to receive us and attend church and all that from the beginning, but Naty has always been very doubtful. She has a really hard time accepting the Book of Mormon. She has some background in several Christian churches, and accepting another book in addition to the Bible is very hard for her. But they went to church; actually, Jony went first by himself! That was pretty cool. Then later Naty and the little girls went as well. The little girls love going to church, they love Primary, and they love learning about the Savior. They are 9 and 11 years old. We were teaching them, but I´ll admit, we were teaching them poorly. They have a complicated schedule and it is hard to find them during the week, so we were only visiting them on Saturdays. We focused so much on trying to help them understand and accept the Book of Mormon that we kind of neglected other important things that we needed to teach, like the Law of Chastity. Well, then we got to those incredibly busy weeks when we didn´t even make it out into the sector to work and we lost contact with them a little. However, they kept going to church by their own initiative. We felt like we had really hit a wall with them. We just weren´t sure how to help them progress. After a lot of discussion with my companion, we decided that we had to take one of two courses with them. Either we had to really just pound the Restoration and the Book of Mormon one more time and try to make them understand that before moving on to other things, or we just had to plow forward and teach the Law of Chastity and see if they would be willing to get married. I was praying trying to figure out what to do. They are a wonderful family; they have been going to church by themselves for a long time without any encouragement from us, and they have incredible potential. Well, I didn´t really feel like either one of those options was exactly right. Finally we decided that we were going to try to start over with them. Just begin from the beginning and teach the Restoration with power and clarity and inspired questions and all the big guns. So last night we went to teach them, talking all the way there and trying to plan the perfect lesson for them. We knew we needed to focus on baptism for the remission of sins and the priesthood authority. We also knew it would be extremely important to ask a lot of questions to make sure that they understood what we were teaching them. We did so, and the lesson was amazing. The Spirit was there, and for the first time I really felt that they understand the Restoration. They understand the need for baptism, and the need for the authority to baptize. What was amazing was to see just how much more they understood than I gave them credit for. They are already thinking about baptism, not really planning for it, but thinking about it. But the best part of the lesson was that Naty finally opened up to us and shared what her doubt really is. We were talking about the Book of Mormon and the need to pray and ask God if it is true, since that is the only way to know if all of this really is the restored gospel and church of Jesus Christ, or just another nice message about the Savior. She said that she always prays, but that she hasn´t yet asked to know the truth of the Book of Mormon. I then felt one little question come into my head. "What impedes you from asking?". She stopped and kind of smiled a bit, and then said, "I´m afraid that the answer will be 'yes' and that I will have to move forward in this path, and I want to see myself change first." SHE KNOWS!!!! She already knows that it is true! She is just afraid of the responsibility of having that knowledge. I was so excited! What makes me even more excited is that now I know what they need! Now that we know her doubt, we can help them to progress. She wants to see a change in herself before she commits to follow the gospel path. I now know that the next step is to teach them the commandments so that they can truly change their lives. They understand the "why", now we just have to teach them the "how". Even better, we talked about General Conference, and explained what it is and how it can help them to receive the answers they are looking for, and they not only committed to go, but said that they are going to try to plan out everything well enough to be able to attend all of the sessions! I know that if they go they will have a wonderful experience; they will hear the words of prophets and apostles! That will give them the strength and courage to move forward.
We continue working with Orlando and visiting some of his friends and acquaintances, and many of them have a lot of potential. They are wonderful people, most of them very humble, who have great need of the Savior in their lives. We actually have another appointment to meet another woman who lives on Orlando´s street tonight. I love Orlando! He´s such a boss! The office work is going well; we have things ALMOST under control now. It´s been hard for us because we are all pretty new in the office right now. President changed the whole office pretty quickly, and none of us were really trained well in our positions by the people who held them before us, so we´ve had a lot of trial and error and just figuring it out. But we are finally feeling like we´ve got things pretty much under control now, and the office and the mission are starting to run much more smoothly. It´s an interesting experience being in the office, I really am learning a lot.
Well, I guess that´s about it for me this week. I hope that everyone enjoys Conference. Take advantage of this wonderful opportunity we will have in the next couple of days. How many people in the history of the world have had the opportunity to hear the voice of a prophet of God and apostles of Jesus Christ? We truly are so incredibly blessed.
I love you all.
Love, Elder Fugal
