Sunday, August 20, 2017

Two Spiritual Experiences

[Editor's Note: If you have been following, Christian does not take many pictures because he is afraid of the camera being stolen. In the absence of pictures from him, I found pictures on the Internet to depicting some of the things he described. None of the following pictures in this post are from Christian.]

Hey Family, 

I realized last week that I´ve been doing a kind of poor job sending good spiritual experiemces to you guys... it´s just SUPER hard to remember when I´m writing, but before I write and after I write I´ve got tons. 

So this week I made a special effort to remember some stuff. I carried around a little slip of paper and made three bullet points in two days. My plan was to do it all week, but with changes and all that... things don´t get too spiritual in the airport haha. 

But anyways... 

1.) The first one happened on last Sunday. We were walking down the street in the early night and we saw a member family. We had eaten a late lunch, (and it was a LOT of food) so we weren´t really excited to eat even though they were really excited to feed us. (We hadn´t made any dinner plans with them or anything; we just found them on the street and they offered us food). So we accepted, but we asked for it to go. So they gave us two take out boxes super full of pollo con tajadas ("pollo chuco" they say here). It´s a typical honduran food. Fried chicken with little strips of fried banana. 
pollo chuco
Super good but we were full and we already had dinner plans. So we took the dinner to go, hoping we could find someone to give it to. We didn´t find ayone who really wanted it. So we went on our way to our planned dinner with Herman and Yeimy. They live in a poorer part of La Paz called la invasión. I think I explained a little bit to dad about it. They basically steal their power and water and build little wood houses. 

humble homes in San Pedro Sula
Herman speaks english so he has a pretty good job at a call center, the reason they live there is because they want to help our Yeimy´s family, who basically has nothing and her mom is pretty old and needs care. So we were on our way there, and I got the idea to go leave the containers of food at an investigator´s house (named Belkis, she also lives in La invasión. So we had to pass by Herman and Yeimy´s house to get to Belkis´s house and right when we passed by it started raining HARD. It started absolutly pouring. My companion said we should just go and eat a Herman´s because Belkis probably would want anyways, but I insisted we needed to leave the food somewhere; maybe it was because I felt bad just dumping perfectly good food that somebody had made for us (or maybe it was the spirit?) So we ran to Belkis´s house, pretty far away. When we got there and offered her the food she started crying and said her sons had gone two days without eating and she had gone 3 days. She was so grateful for the food we´d brought her. I was so glad we´d made that little extra trip to bring her the food. So we went to Herman´s house and he brought her some beans, rice and flour (to make tortillas) to last her about a week. It was super sad, but I´m grateful we didn´t hear about it the next time we had a visit planned on Wednesday. And I´m also glad Herman is there to help her if she needs it. Those two kids ate that chicken SO fast! 

2.) On Monday we had a big meeting and I brought my Preach My Gospel. 
missionary handbook
 Usually I don´t carry it with me, but on that day I was just about the only day ever. So.. in the night we stumbled on a couple fighting in the street (with words, not legit fighting; even though I´ve seen that before too). Usually when I see that I don´t say anything- I walk by- i don´t know- it makes me super uncomfortable... like a not my buisiness kinda thing. But my fearless companion walks up and starts to contact them. I think they were both a little suprised and caught off guard. So we contacted them and went into their house where we began to talk and learned that they were already members! They just both had been baptised as kids but hadn´t returned to church in years and years. They were still super mad at eachother, and I felt like we needed to do something kinda different. I took out my PMG and flipped to the part where it talks about the companionship inventory. 
companionship inventory
We talked with them a little bit and helped them as they went through the steps. At the end we told them to hug and they did. We finished with a prayer and left. The next day their neighbor tracked us down and asked us to teach them. Word spreads pretty fast I guess. I´m the Honduran Dr. Phil or I don´t know what. I don´t think I´ve ever seen Dr.Phil but I think that´s basically what he does. 

I love you guys! 

-E´ Stoddard

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