Mason's Letter -- August 22, 2011

Hey familia,

How is everyone doing? Thanks for all the e-mails... apparently everyone starts remembering you exist when it gets close for you to come home hahahaha totally joking. Well this week was a good one, we worked really hard and my comp is starting to get used to it all, even though he continually has diarrhea.... i just say ¨welcome to Honduras. there's nothing you can do about it. But he's hanging in there.

The work here continues to go forth. We have 2 families that will get married on the 30th (hopefully we can get all the paperwork done). So that will be 6 baptisms for the first week in September. It was cool because with the one family, the dad used to be kind of hard and put off by the gospel, but we have been working with him and gaining his confidence and the wife is super super faithful. she has been praying so that he listens, and he has and they decided to get married and we challenged him to baptism as well and he said yes. So that's awesome.

The other family went through a trial this week. The father used to be part of a gang when he was 15, so he has a bunch of tattoos. and only gang members have tattoos here and nobody will give you work or respect you if you have them. So he has had a struggle with that his whole life. But lately the cops have been abducting people with tattoos and killing them without any reason lately... well he got abducted this week and we were over at his cousin's house painting when they called to tell us the cops grabbed him while he was selling food house to house. Everyone freaked out and thought he would be killed. So they took his kids over to the police to prove that he wasn't a gangster, but the cops wanted to see his ID. Luckily I had his ID in my backpack to give to the Municipality for the wedding, so everything turned out fine and he was released.

We were supposed to have a baptism this last week but Satan got in the way and she couldn't get baptized, now she thinks that God didn't let her get baptized and that she shouldn't do it. So we will go with her tomorrow and see if she prayed and how she feels about it all. Hopefully that goes through on Saturday.

We continue to look for families. We have found a few more and are excited about that. the ZLs told me this week that the other elders said that here it was impossible to teach more than 3 lessons a day, and we have been doing an average of 7 per day. So I know that will help the work out a ton. we did an activity this week in a member's home and it turned out way good. Almost 30 members showed up with 5 investigators. That's like almost what they get out to church on Sunday haha. So we will do another activity here. We came up with some good games and the people loved them and went a little crazy.

We have gained the confidence of the branch president and he's excited about the work as well. It's amazing what a positive attitude can do. When I leave I hope Elder Peterson will have this type of mindset about the work and the area and from then on there should be positive feelings here and faith. I feel good here and feel like I'm working the best that I ever have, and am putting all the experience from my whole mission together. We are really being efficient. I love this work. It will be sad to finish and leave this great people. thanks for all your support and love.

Love Elder Mason Cardon.