¡Hola mi familia y mis amigos!
Last week, dad, you asked about fleas and if I´ve been having any problems with them. Well, you´re right, with the incredulous dog population of Chile comes the incessant annoyance of fleas. I´m pretty sure I have fleas in my bed, because I have fleas bites all the way up my left side of my body, which is the side I sleep on. I also have flea bites on every other side of my body, but they´re more concentrated on that side. In one spot on my ankle, I have 13 bites in a 2.5 x 2 inch rectangle, haha. I´ve changed my sheets a couple of times, but there´s not really much that you can do. I just wonder if they like my blood because I eat so much manjar, which is really sweet and sugary. No worries, as long as I don´t get some exotic disease or something... which would be a cool story.
One cool thing I like about Chile is the valentinas, these little makeshift kites made of balsa wood crossmembers and tissue paper, that everyone is always flying. Literally at any point in the day you can look out over the city and see a few valentinas in the sky. Everyone from 5 year old girls to 70 year old men fly them, and the funniest is when you see all the ghetto gangster teenagers sitting around flying them as they crank rap music or something, it´s great. All the Chileans just like to take some time to relax and fly a kite on a sunny day in Viña, but somehow they don´t have 30 seconds to hear a message about Jesus Christ, how families can be together forever, or basically how all their problems in life can be solved...
You asked about the man whose son killed his wife and then himself. He lives way the heck out at the edge of our area, so we´ve gone out there a few times and have knocked doors in that area so that there are more people to visit then just him, and we actually have a couple quality investigators over there now. It turns out this man, 6 months after his son did that, also lost his 5 year old daughter because some gang member clubbed her in the head and then threw her in the sea tied to a rock. A bit extreme. This was all about 2 years ago, and actually pretty much every member that we´ve told this about has known exactly who he is from the news stroies back then. The problem is, he´s is having a really hard time making time for us to teach him, and when we come by, he makes excuses to not let us in. He has a wife and other daughter who is grown who live with him, but we only just met them last Friday finally, and they told us that he needs a psychologist and whatnot, but with some conversation, we set up a time to teach those two tonight, so we´re going to try going about this more through them.
We have a great pool of investigators, and we really try to sift through the ones that will waste our time so that we can spend more time finding those who really will accept our message and come unto Christ, and we have seen the Hand of the Lord in the work as we have done that. It is really an act of faith to decide what to do each day, who to meet up with at any given time, and just to keep working nonstop all day every day. I LOVE IT.
Our next baptism will be Victor, the week after General Conference. He is about 68, and we had to really, really battle for him, because his entire apartment building is stout catholic and they all go to church together and he didn´t want to listen to us or even try to pray about our messager to see for himself if it was true, but after a sweet 40 minute testimony session about the Restoration from the missionaries, something triggered in him and now he has just been completing every commitment and knows the Book of Mormon is true and Joseph Smith was a prophet and what that means in his life personally. It´s so great, and he has just melted into the ward already, the high priests love him. His wife and neighbors are all still way Catholic and are great people, but he opened his heart to listen to what God had to tell him indivually, and now he is seeing the blessings. He has been searching for work for a couple of years, and last week at the ward party for the 18, he received a job offer from a member´s relative that was there! The church is true, bro.
Ok, awesome story time: Saturday, my comp and I just had this strange urge to search all day long. We spent hours knocking doors and combing our area to get new investigators. We got into a couple of houses, but we felt like continuing on like that. It was about 8:30 at night and we were still doing it, and we saw this lady walking out of her house. We started talking to her and I shared a little about our message and how it blesses the family in particular. Then, everything went dark, literally. In Viña, there is a streetlight every 10 feet it seems like, and they go all night long, so that it is light as day outside 24/7. However, just then, about 80 percent of the country of Chile had a blackout. Notwithstanding, we asked to pass into her house and share our message with her, and Regina (the lady) said yes! So we entered and sat on her couch in pitch black while her 22 year old daughter found candles and lit them. Regina sat down with us, and we invited the daughter, Elisabeth, to join us, and she said yes! We then explained who we were, sang a hymn, said a prayer, and shared the message of the restoration with a special emphasis on families. Immediately, the daughter was crying and they started holding hands. We explained how families can be together forever through the saving ordinances of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the proper authority of a living prophet. We shared the story of Joseph Smith, and the mother was all over it when we finished, saying that she believed it and then shared experiences in her life of praying by faith and seeing the answers to her prayers. Apparently, her cousin had a sort of blood cancer, and they all prayed with real faith that he could be healed, and the operation went well and he´s okay now. Also, her other daughter, after 13 years of slowly dying from some disease and suffering the whole time, was finally laid to rest peacefully after they prayed with faith, which brought peace to the family. I was able to share my testimony about how families can be together forever, even with deaths like this. Regina then expressed how amazed and glad she was that she let us in her home. She said she never, never, never, lets people in her house that she doesn´t know, and how she has ignored strangers on the street all her life and the like, and then here she was letting us in her house in a blackout. She said she felt like she should let us in for some reason, and she is so glad she did.
It was the best lesson ever. Not because of the missionaries, but because of how strong the Sprit was and how receptive Regina and Elisabeth were to their thoughts and feelings during the lesson. The blackout was literally a miracle. There were no distractions. Chile was, for once, quiet. Elisabeth wouldn´t have even listened to us if there wasn't a blackout because she would have been on the computer or doing something else, but God loved her so much that He shut down the entire country so she could hear and feel how much He truly loves her. As we left that house, Regina thanked us sincerely for bringing tranquility to her home, and asked us to come back. The walk home was so amazing; the stars were so clear with the absence of city lights and the Milky Way was right there across the sky. What a beautiful world we live in. I love you all so much!
Love, Elder Kimball
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