Mi corazón está en Cusco: Softening Hearts

Well, this week was truly a week of miracles. Here´s just a couple stories to prove this point.

// We have been visiting a less active lady since I got here to Puno with Hna Valverde. And when I say less active I actually mean that she´s been completely, 100% inactive for longer than I´ve been alive and has some really hard feelings against the church for some things that happened when she first got baptized. It´s always been hard to really get to her. We would visit her, teach a nice lesson and from there nothing really happened. I went by a couple weeks ago when we were on divisions with some of the other sisters and (long story short) she yelled in my face and told me that all her problems were my fault. If we hadn´t been coming by she would have had more clients, her husband wouldn´t be so mean to her, etc. Threw us out and told us to never come back again. The next week, when we were on divisions again, Hna Mendez went back and her husband (who´s not actually her husband. I just don´t know what the appropiate word for "pareja" is in English. Basically they have lived together for years but aren´t married, don´t plan to get married, and kind of despise the other´s presence...) yelled at them, basically saying the same thing. After that we didn´t really stop by more. We always pass her house because she lives in the middle of our "investigator pool" but we never knock or go in. The other day we walked by and the door for her store was open and she was sitting there by herself. We decided to just go in for a little bit to see how she was doing. What we thought would only be a ten or fifteen minute visit turned into almost an hour and a half. We had a really incredible talk about the Atonement and true repentance. She ended up crying and apologizing and asking us to come back every day if we could to help her get back up.

// We are visiting a family that´s investigating the church. I think I actually told you a little bit about them. The mom is the lady that gave us dinner on her flipped over barrels with paper for a tablecloth. They´ve always been a little slow to understand and act on what we teach. We were trying to figure out how to help them out a little bit more. We usually don´t teach the Family Proclamation until they are close to baptism, but we thought we should teach it with them. It was a lesson that words can´t really describe. Even better, the next time we went by we taught the gospel of Christ and they both said that they wanted to be baptized. I didn´t really know how to reply because it took me by such suprise. They are reading the Book of Mormon and praying and coming to church and making friends. I love teaching them.

// Nelly is changing her whole life. Before I get ahead of myself, she´s getting baptized this Saturday!! She should get a call from a new job that she´s trying to get on Tuesday and depending on what they say, she might have to travel though . . . pray that all will be well. But seriously, I´ve never seen someone change their life around so quickly and so willingily in my life. There have been some really, really hard things that have happened to her since she was younger, and you can see the scars that they´ve made on her. But in this past week, everything clicked with her. She´s always believed what we´ve been teaching her, but now she really gets that it all applies for her as well. It broke my heart, but she would always talk about how the things that have happened are too great to be forgiven. She just started crying the other day when we were with her. We were caught a little off gaurd, but listening to her talk about the Atonement and what her baptism meant for her . . . again, no words. It has truly been a priviledge getting to teach her and learn from her.

There are so many more, but for time, I´m stopping there. As for news for the week, our distict leader ended his mission. Sad about that, but I´ve only heard good things about the new guy. Hna Mendez and I are staying together her in Puno!! Happy about that :) President is coming to Puno this week. For the other zone though, not for us . . . but that´s alright. Nelly wants us to invited him to her baptism, so maybe we´ll end up seeing him. Haha, we´ll see how that works out. Not too much out of the ordinary going on. Just working hard as always :)

Thanks for the love and support. Love you all! Have a fantastic week.

Hna Condie