Mason's Letter -- September 27, 2010

Hey Familia,

This week went pretty good. We didn't have a baptism, it is rescheduled for October 9th. So that was a bummer, but oh well.

Well this week I finally had to go into the offices and the registries to finally get registered as a resident of Honduras. I've been living here illegally for more than a year now haha. But now my fingerprints are all in the system and I'm officially 100% "catracho" [slang expression for "Honduran"]. It was fun though because we had to go with almost everyone from the group that came with me. It felt like a one year anniversary party. We even found a restaurant that is like Chipotle here. So we went to it. It looks exactly like Chipotle so we asked the owner where he got the idea, and he told us he stole it from Chipotle hahaha. oh Honduras, but it still wasn't quite as good a food. close though.

So this week I had to do a few baptism interviews, and I went one morning and helped out a struggling area in my district. It went really good and we found a lot of cool people for them. It really animated them and now they are working a lot better. So I was glad we were able to help them.

This week we kept working with the Noriega family. He is an ex missionary but inactive, and his family aren't members. They have been progressing really well. But the mom had some doubts about Joseph Smith, so we went there and watched the restoration video with them and shared some powerful testimonies. It was really good and we felt the Spirit strongly.

A few weeks ago I gave a class to the zone about the importance of the Book of Mormon. in Preach My Gospel it invites us as missionaries to put the promise in Moroni 10 often. So I invited the missionaries to pray in the week to receive another witness from the Holy Ghost of the truth of it to be able to maintain a strong testimony. So I did the same thing in the week. One morning I read a few chapters and went to the bathroom to pray alone. I prayed asking for another spiritual witness of the truthfulness of it. I prayed for a long time but I never felt anything. so I went back to my desk and began to ponder all the things that are in the Book of Mormon and I flipped through the pages and skimmed over the highlighted scriptures. It was then that I received an answer. I felt a burning in my chest that was at first really small. But as I pondered and flipped through the pages the feeling grew and grew.

It was a really powerful manifestation to me through the Holy Ghost that it was true. I already knew that it was true and had already received an answer, but it was really great to receive another, and one so powerful and meaningful. I learned that sometimes just a prayer is not enough. It says in the intro of the book that we need to read, pray, and PONDER the message to receive a witness. So that experience taught me a lot and helped me to testify with power in these last few weeks and has helped me to help others receive an answer as well.

Also we found a really cool guy named Fernando this week. He was a reference from some other missionaries from awhile ago, but we have never been able to find him. Well this week we finally found him. I guess he already had a Book of Mormon and had been reading it. He was on the way home from La Cieba the other day and he was thinking about how he wanted to talk to us and stuff about the book and that's the exact moment when I called him. He was really impressed that God was guiding him to this. Then yesterday we were supposed to go to his house but we were having a hard time finding it (the directions here are crappy, they don't have addresses they just say things like go past the coconut tree and walk about a mile, then take a right at the red truck and you cant miss it). But we finally found it late last night. I don't know why we looked so long and so hard but we did. So we found him and at that exact moment he was talking with one of his friends about how he was waiting for us to come but that we never showed up and that he was interested and wanted to talk to us. At that moment we knocked on his door. So he took that as another sign from God that this is correct. It's really cool how God guides us when we don't even realize it. We needed to contact him in those exact 2 moments so that he could really see that God wanted this for him. So that was really cool for me.

Well family I love you all. hope you have great weeks.

Love Elder Mason Cardon