Better Late than Never!

May 16, 2016

Well here we are in another Argentine Cyber writing on a frustrating keyboard that doesn’t press well.  And it’s pretty cold now as we are finally in winter. bleh.  But it’s better than sweating all the time so we are happy.  But sadly the shower broke so we only have cold water, looks like we will be repairing it today to survive.  But don’t worry, we still have been bathing ourselves by heating up a pot of water then mixing it with some cold water to get that nice warm 4 minute pour a cup of water over your body to wash off type of shower.  It’s great to be in that again.... well.... mas o menos.

Sorry for not writing last week, I was busy writing a lot of people and figured that I wouldn’t have a lot of time to write a big news update.  But I’ll fill you in on how Mother’s day went:

Crying, laughing, being in aweshock because the kitchen is so new and different, and it’s getting warm over there and it’s cold here.  It was a great day.

And now for the week updates.

We are finding new people who are progressing but none of them could come to church because it rained and when it rains, all the roads get messed up and then super muddy and if you don’t have a car, you just basically stay inside all day.  It’s the worst day ever for a missionary- when there are rain clouds on Sunday.  IT’S CALLED SUNDAY FOR A REASON, STORM CLOUDS! ¡¡¡QUE LOS NUBES SE VAYAN YA PUES!!! ja ja. Well we always have next Sunday.

We are teaching a smallish family with two daughters and its somewhat hard here to teach everyone at the same time because everyone is doing other things, or is gone.  So we mainly teach Daiana and Ayelen.  They’re really awesome and they like Jessica (young women’s counselor) a lot so we are having success in teaching them.  We are trying to get people to progress and it seems like they are progressing little by little.

We talked to Espifanio about faith.  We told him that if he chooses to obey God first, everything will go good in the end.  So when we invited him to exercise his faith by going to the registro civil and getting papers to be married in the next week he said “yes”.   Looks like he is gonna be married here in the next couple of  days! yay!  But we will be verifying with him here in the next couple of hours. So keep your fingers crossed and a prayer in your heart.  I have been studying a ton about faith, and confiding in the Lord’s promises.  It’s really hard to exercise faith when you are surrounded by doubt at every corner, and the doubts are usually somewhat convincing right?  So as I was reading for this transfer, we have talked about having faith in that the Lord will provide.  And when we asked Heavenly Father for help in our baptismal goal, we were shocked to find just those people that are progressing and have accepted dates to get baptized.  But when we were doing all in our power to get them to church, it seemed that after all of our efforts, it seems like the very jaws of hell are gaping open for us and our investigators with the amount of drama, obstacles, and rain that seemed to be against us, but the Lord has counseled us "that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good." D&C122:7.  So we are still going and trying, I can feel it in my bones that we will succeed because we have the almighty God on our side, and nothing is impossible to Him.

I talked about faith last minute (yes they do tend to give missionaries last minute talks) this Sunday and I like what I even learned as the spirit illuminated my understanding of faith:  Faith increases our understanding of what type of person we want to be, not important to the outcome of our work.  There have been plenty of men and women unrecognized to the work yet did so many selfless acts to others.  I know too that when we do all that we can to invite people to know the gospel and be baptized, not all of them and perhaps none shall accept.  But the amount of baptisms you will have on a mission doesn’t show your faith, I believe that your faith is shown when you truly have no results of your labor to show, yet you did your hardest, and you keep going.  We often think that by obeying God we are "entitled" to receive some type of blessing, yes that is true, but we often look at it in a materialistic way, and when we don’t get what we want immediately, we tend to say to ourselves "it isn’t true. Why should I try to keep doing good if it seems that good never comes for me?"  But lo the most important part of faith is that it shows you who you really are, especially when you won’t receive perhaps any glory from the world.  But the type of glory we shall receive is exaltation and salvation with Him who created us.  Don’t give up the fight of your faith just because you are down a couple of points, there is still time left on the clock to have a miracle performed by Him who is mighty to save.  You shall win if you trust in the Savior. Y ou will look back and say just as Paul did of old before being beheaded "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith"  2 Timothy 4:7. SO DONT GIVE UP WHEN THINGS GET HARD!

I love all of you and hope you all know it.  I’m sure there will be a time where we can talk face to face and laugh and cry and enjoy the company of one another.  Write me if you want to talk, send me pictures of your life and fun things that are going on in it, you won’t regret it!

Elder Burke