Wise Use of our 12 Hours

This week was pretty good, on wednesday we had to go to Cordoba to do exchanges with the assistants of the president, I went with a brazilian named elder Da Silva. It was funny because we had the same trainer, elder Packer! Elder Packer says he is proud of his 2 sons..but yeah the exchange was good, we taught some of their investigators who are going to be baptized this week. On the way back, it was kind of an adventure because the taxi driver "got lost" trying to get to the bus terminal. I dont know if I believe him because the whole world goes there and its huge, but he drove us all over the place and by the time we got there it was super late and the taxi ride cost 300 pesos, the most expensive taxi ride of my whole mission I think. The mission had also already bought our bus tickets, but we got there 10 mins late and missed the last bus. Thankfully we found a different company there that had a late bus going to Rio Cuarto, if not we would have had to stay the night there. Its just a shame because the tickets the mission bought will be wasted now.

We slept in a little bit the next day because we got back at 3:00am. Im kind of tired of going to cordoba because its 6 hours of travel in one day, and we always have to get up really early and we get back super late and it messes up the schedule a lot. We will be going again on the 31 of this month, and again on the 4th. 

President has made a new system of exchanges, at least once a month the zone leaders from each zone have to go to the area of the APs to work with them for a day, the idea is that the area of the assistants will be an example for the mission. It should work out pretty well, because the APs and zone leaders have a lot of experience, so with all of the ZLs and APs working in one area Im sure they will baptize a lot there. We have to do the same thing in our zone, at least once a month we have to bring the district leaders to our area to work and make our area and example for the zone. It works really well, we tried it for the first time this week on Friday and we had a lot of success! Exchanges motivate everyone to work harder, and there are always little miracles during the exchanges if we work hard. This friday I was working with an elder named Elder Dayley, he is from Utah and has 10 months in the mission. We met this guy named Roberto who is super cool, he believes a lot in God and in the power of prayers, He said he would pray and that he would like to be baptized if God answers his prayer. We are hoping he will be able to come to church next sunday! His main problem is that he lives alone except for an old lady that he takes care of, but he says that she cant be left alone. We will figure something out though. 

Another one of the people we are working with is named Amelia, she is 56 years old and she told us that she has been meeting with the missionaries for 25 years and that the only reason she hasnt been baptized yet is because her husband isnt divorced from his ex wife, so they havent been able to get married yet. But in a situation like this its hard, because if they havent taken action for 25 years its not likely that they ever will. But you never know, God has a time for everything. Maybe they just havent taken action because they dont understand the commandments. We are planning to go and just talk really openly with them and we will see what happens! 

There is a catholic priest here who is a leader of "la iglesia de fátima", one of the biggest churches in Rio Cuarto. But in the past month he has talked to 2 of our best investigators and told them to stop meeting with us, and they did. It was really annoying, our ward mission leader says we should go into the catholic church and confront him and give him a piece of our minds. He said that if the catholics believe that their church is true, why doesnt their priest let the people use their agency and let God answer their prayers to find out which church is true? I dont think we are going to go in there though haha. 

Not that much else to write about this week. Ill share a scripture that I liked this week, its 

John 11: 9 Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world.

10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.

It thought it was a really interesting scripture! At first I was thinking of it more literally...its true that there are 12 hours in a day, and that if there is light you arent going to trip because you see where you are going. In the night time its a little harder to see where you are going, and you will probably trip. But I started to think about it a little bit deeper. Who is the light of the world? Jesus. If we are walking in the light of this world, we are walking with Jesus, doing and saying the things that he would say. We arent going to trip, because when we do whats right God protects us and guides us! He will guide us on the path in life that he wants us to take and the path that will lead us to happiness!  But if we arent keeping the commandments, we have no such promise and we will probably trip because we dont have the protection of the spirit to keep us safe and out of trouble. 

Thats it! Here are some sweet pics with elder Cortés. 

Love you all have a good week!!

Elder Christensen ​