12 November 2012 - La Cantera, Coquimbo

¡Hola mi familia y mis amigos!

One of the methods of finding new investigators I've used my whole mission is by using the church files of members, because there are so many inactive members everywhere in Chile, and those inactive members many times have family members or people that could get interested in the church. The church files make all sorts of lists that are handy, and you can organize them by address or by birthday or by who has the priesthood or who is missing ordinances, etc. I used the birthday list one a lot in some areas because there was almost always a couple of members having their birthday every day of the year, so we would go pass by those members on their birthday. Many of the people don't live there anymore or something, but sometimes you could run into them and be like "Happy Birthday!!" and they'd get all happy and warmed up to us. A couple of people accused me of just trying to mooch birthday cake, but I wouldn't even be able to eat anyways. :) Anyways, la Cantera, where I work now, is basically all new housing, so we only have the information of members that have been active in the last 5-8 years that la Cantera has even existed. In other words, all the inactive members still exist in our area, but we don't have their information because their address and information got left behind in the old ward where they were baptized. Therefore, since being here in August, I've collected all the information I can about members whose information isn't in our records here in Coquimbo. Whenever we run into an inactive member in the street or just randomly, I always get their information in order to ask for their member file from their previous wards. While I was at it, I went ahead and made notes of all the mess-ups in the current member files of our own ward (because there are a TON, wrong addresses and people who should be grouped with their families, etc), and then we got together with the branch secretary last week and did a deep clean of our records. It was so sweet and now the member files look so much cleaner, organized, and useful. We ended up asking for 26 member files from other wards of inactive members that we work with or have run into randomly since August.

Other fun things I've done...last week, Maribiks' mom accidentally started a grease fire on their stove and caught the curtain on fire and everything, but they got it calmed down soon enough that there was no real harm down. It just left the entire corner walls stained black from the fire, when they were originally white. We came over on Saturday morning to serve them and paint the wall white again, but it turned out that we really only just had to scrub down well enough and it came out almost as white as it was before. We already had the paint ready and everything, though, so we went ahead and just painted it all white for fun anyways.

The Saturday before that, we had a sweet Coquimbo district activity in the plaza. The relief societies of each of the branches came and set up stands and demonstrations about some things the relief society does in the church, including, home gardening, emergency preparedness, handcrafts, family history, and food storage/canning. They asked for a couple of missionaries to be there to help talk to people and do our thing, so Elder Oberg and I went and set up our own stand with Books of Mormon and Liahonas and pamphlets of all kinds and Proclamations to the World and pictures of Christ and movies, etc. It was a great turnout and it's so nice to see when people come to you instead of having to do it the other way around like what normally happens. It really got the relief society sisters opened up, too, and they were able to share their testimonies and speak with more confidence about what they believe in and what they do in the relief society organization. One lady came and talked to me for 40 minutes with just all kinds of questions she's always wanted answered but no one as ever been able to give her an answer she could really believe before. She was funny, because she would say, "I'm really not in much of a hurry, would you mind if I just kept asking you questions?" She even saw a pamphlet on tithing on our table and went away with it, and even wanted to start paying it after I taught her what it really is and how it blesses us. Hopefully the Elders in La Serena, where she's from, can keep the ball rolling and get her into the church soon.

We've been talking a lot to our recent converts about patriarchal blessings, what they are and how to get them, because we realized how helpful they could be for them. One of them, Fernando, a 26 year old who got baptized last April, is so fun to teach because he always asks about the most obscure hypothetical situations to whatever we teach. When we explained the declaration of lineage to one of the 12 tribes, he was just worried that he wouldn't be adopted into any of them. "Elders, what happens if the patriarch doesn't receive any revelation about it or doesn't know which one I should be in? Or what happens if I'm not even in any of them? Can he just write me a note and say, 'sorry, you're not in any tribe, but it's ok, you'll be fine.' or can I just start my own tribe?" Remind me some day to tell you about his cancer-healing Tibetan fungi juice. I love you all!

Love, Elder Kimball