Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Elder Zach Taylor - Week 3 of Obligado

Hello!
Another week here in Obligado...
On Tuesday we had interviews with President LaPierre. I love having interviews with the mission president, I feel like I can just talk to him about anything. President told me in our interview that the place Im at right now is one of the hardest areas in the whole mission. He´s been considering just taking out the missionaries for a while, but decided to put me and my companion in kind of as a last hope effort. Apparently this area hasn´t been growing in a very long time. The area consists of a couple cities, Obligado and Trinidad. There used to be a branch in both cities, but a few years ago it seems like everyone in Trinidad decided to stop going to church, and they took out the branch and just combined it with the one in Obligado. Now when we go to Trinidad to talk with the less actives, they use the excuse that the church is too far away, so they can´t go. And everyone in Obligado has just gotten lazy. President LaPierre said he knows this place is suffering, and he´s probably just going to take out the missionaries for a while if it continues this way. I´ve definitely been feeling it these past couple weeks here. It´s a very difficult area where me and my companion just don´t feel wanted by anyone. We thought that maybe we should just go to last resort and run around clapping doors all day, but we didn´t enter into a single house. Sometimes I feel like darth vader, and everyone here are a bunch of Lukes. ¨Search your feelings, you know it to be true!¨ ¨NO, THAT´S IMPOSSIBLE!!¨ ... But I´m not about to give up. I realize that I wouldn´t be put here if it werent for something, even if it takes a long time to figure out what that purpose is. All I have to worry about is doing my best. What the people decide to do is out of my hands. 
I´m not going to lie, it´s been a relatively unsuccessful week. We had about the same church assistance as the first week. I´m just thankful for the 3 faithful families that continue to go, even though times are hard here. If it weren´t for them, the church wouldn´t even exist in this area. 
We did have one small success, though. We went on Saturday to go look for a familiy that before visited with the missionaries. We asked the neighbors if they know which house it was. They told us that they moved a few months ago, but they invited us in to listen. It wasn´t anything too special, but they did say we could come back. I´m just glad we´ve found someone to teach. 
This morning I was reading in 2 Nephi 4. Verses 15 - 35 are just amazing. I love the way Nephi declares his love for the lord and that he will always follow in his footsteps. It was a powerful passage that just hit me right to the very center. Something I noticed too, I´m pretty sure those verses inspired the words to the song Ï love the lord¨. It´s pretty similar.
Well, I´m glad I was able to email you today. It was kind of a pain finding a computer. There arent any public ones and the one in the church broke, so we had to go to a members house. I heard my family lent our computer to the missionaires over there, I know how thankful they must have been! 
I´m hoping for a better week this week, but I´m thankful for the tiny successes we´ve had so far. Talk to you all later! 
Elder Taylor

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