Hey everybody!
I hope you all had a great week!
Mine was really good. Not a whole lot to tell, but here we go. On Wednesday we did exchanges. I worked with a new elder (3 weeks in Mexico) in his area. I know his trainer pretty well and he’s been stressing out about training because he hasn’t been in the mission very long either. But the new missionary is doing super well! It was a fun day, always good to get to know other missionaries and other areas. Also on a side note, I have progressed lots in eating spicy food. On this exchange I was putting habanero on my food. Felt pretty cool. And it’s funny because everybody assumes that Americans don’t eat anything spicy and then I take the salsa and everyone’s like oh be careful it’s probably too spicy for you and then it’s not that bad. +1 respect.
Thursday was awesome. So, like half of the ward is one family, the Garcia family. And they’re all cousins or brothers or something. Literally like half the people at church on Sunday are from this family and they have a cousin who is a single mom with 3 kids. Her name is Blanca and her kids are Michelle, Andrea and Dante. Michelle is 8, Andrea is 9 and Dante is 3. The missionaries taught them a while ago but not recently. Sometimes she comes to church, but my old companion told me she just wasn’t that interested and goes for her kids. But like 2 weeks ago we were at church, and she was there. I felt like I should ask if we could visit her and we set up an appointment for the next Wednesday. We visited her, she was super interested this time, and we asked when we could go by again and she told us the next day! We go by the next day and everything’s great and we invited her to be baptized and she said yes! Her kids weren’t there so we didn’t invite them as a family. But this was all last week. This week we visited them on Tuesday and the kids were there and we invited them to think and pray as a family if they wanted to be baptized together. We go back Thursday for the lesson, and Blanca told us they all want to be baptized together! So we will hopefully have their 3 baptisms this Saturday the 5th! I’m super excited for them, they’re such a great family and I know they will be so blessed for their decision.
Friday we had zone conference in Pachuca. It was really good and it’s always fun to see friends from other areas. It just stinks sometimes because they’re way long. We didn’t get back to Actopan until 6 pm, then our 2 lessons cancelled and then I had 3 baptismal interviews to do. So Friday we did like 0 missionary work.
Saturday I was looking through the old paper area book and I was looking especially at the old baptism registries. There’s about 25 of them and we know 0 of them. So we wrote down all their phone numbers or addresses and we called a few of them that day. A lot of the numbers had changed, but a few picked up and were really happy to hear from us and so we set up a few appointments for next week and I’m hoping we can help them come back to church! Also looking through the old area book got me so excited about being a missionary. I’m not sure why but it got me so fired up. Now I know what to do when I’m not feeling super up to the work haha
Sunday was cool because we ate with the whole Garcia family. There was like 30 people there. And the food was super good. We had ximbo and consome which I love. Ximbo is chicken and cactus wrapped in a maguey plant and then baked in an underground oven. I love it. And then consome is soup but made from the leftover juice from barbacoa. It’s also very good. I meant to take a picture but I forgot. All I have are pictures of Elder Cruz and me in cowboy hats.
Today we went to Tepatepec to play soccer with the elders there. We went to eat first and I ate cow brain! (thus the title of this email) It’s called sesos and it didnt taste that bad actually. I will add a picture. It was cut up with onions and stuff. Then we played soccer and basketball.
This week I’ve been reading in Helaman. I love Helaman 5:12 it’s a classic, but I had never really realized how good the chapter is as a whole. Here is verse 30
"And it came to pass when they heard this voice, and beheld that it was not a voice of thunder, neither was it a voice of a great tumultuous noise, but behold, it was a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper, and it did pierce even to the very soul"
I love this explanation of how the spirit works, and I love this line. I have had experiences just like this one, where I feel a prompting and it’s not like someone yelling at me but it’s the still small voice that we always talk about. And the last line is my favorite, when we are ready and listening for these promptings, they will pierce our soul like it says here. It was just a verse I really liked that I can now use to help people understand what the holy ghost feels like.
Anyway, sorry for the long email, but it was a good week and I wanted to tell you guys about it.
Elder Stevenson
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