CATCH-UP

The elder abides:

January 5, 2015

Hello everybody!

So far, we’ve had guesses like “Ooh! It’s Kermit! Because you were green from being sick!” and that they are the names of the cockroaches in our apartment. Close, but not yet (and not really close)!

Happy New Year! This was kind of a weird week, too. We heard lots of fireworks/gunshots (they sound remarkably similar when they wake you up in the middle of the night) this week. There is an interesting feature of a certain brand of Mexican fireworks in that they aren’t illegal (because nothing is), they sound exactly like a civil-war-era cannon, and they only go off right in the middle of lessons. But this year, only 6 people died in our neighborhood from the festivities! (That’s a joke; I don’t think they count things like that here.)

Don’t let that scare you (I know you’re all very concerned). We’re super protected as missionaries and we have a lot of rules to keep us safe and stuff.

This week, Diego and Karla came to church! Whoo!!! I don’t know if I’ve told you already, but Diego has been taught by the missionaries off-and-on for like 8 years. Karla is his girlfriend, and he introduced her to us and the church. They came to Sacrament meeting yesterday, we taught them last night in the chapel, and we’re teaching them again tonight! The church is true!

They’re really our only investigators worth mentioning. I’m in a pretty hard area right now and we almost never teach. It’s so interesting that when people have money, they don’t think they need the Gospel. That seems so backwards to me. Every time I learn something new, whether it’s about the Gospel, or Spanish, or physics, or people, it’s a testimony of the divine origin of that thing about which I have learned. For example:

This earth was placed the perfect distance from the sun to allow life. Any closer, we’d burn up. Any farther, we’d freeze (Edmonton, Canada, is exempt from this example). We, as humans, are capable of extremely complex thought, but even without thinking (and excepting those rare examples when something goes wrong) our bodies function properly. Our hearts beat, our stomachs digest food, our immune systems fight diseases we didn’t know we had. Mammals are capable of producing food to ensure that their offspring survive from their own bodies. Fish can breathe underwater. Birds’ bones are hollow to allow them to be able to fly. The platypus is a real thing! I don’t want to offend anybody reading this (I don’t really know who reads this) but if you believe that this all happened at random, I encourage you to open your eyes. There is NO WAY this could have happened except under the direction of a divine, perfect, all-knowing hand. Everything I see, from the fact that bubbles hold their shape to a beautiful sunset, testifies to me of a living, loving, perfectly intelligent being who governs everything we see.

I love you guys. Share your testimonies with your friends and the people you love. They want to hear it, even if they don’t know it.

Élder Webb