Happy Week of Love!

Saturday Ashley, and Leonel were baptized! 

 

Hey everybody! How's it going? Hopefully all is well :)

This week has been an interesting one! Getting to know the new area and everything is pretty crazy. There's something that I love about this area here in Heredia, and that's the members. This ward here is pretty old, with a fair amount of members who have grown up in the church and everything, so you could say it's got a little 'stateside' feel. But, it's honestly something so beautiful to me.

The members here love us. They just love us! They feed us, they worry for us, they just love us. But the thing that catches me is that I didn't have to earn their love. I honestly didn't do anything to deserve their love!

Many times in this life we think that people need to earn our respect, our trust, and our love. But the Savior teaches us otherwise. He loved the sinner, and He put trust in completely incapable humans, even though He knew that they were going to mess up. As always, He gave the example! We should give our love, trust, and respect to everyone. Obviously, we should be reasonable, but the both can be done! The world tells us every day to shut ourselves away, because of some obscure reason, but really we'll always be rewarded for giving our love to others.

The members here understand this principle which, frankly, is really hard for me! They just love. They gladly accept new people (like me!) into their lives, with arms open! It really isn't important to them that I'm from the States or where I was before or how my Spanish is or anything like that, they just offer their love to the Lord -- through service to their fellow brethren. It's something that on paper is soo easy, but to apply can be pretty difficult. But it can be achieved! And it should be achieved.

Let us love one another! We'll find that as we love, we feel more love. Perhaps not immediately from other people, but we have it on promise that we'll feel the Love of God more in our lives. And God ALWAYS fulfills his promises!

Sorry that the letter is teeny this week! Lots to do and little time.

Have a great, love filled week!

-Elder Henry

Answers to questions!

That's really sweet what Ivania sent :-) I called Isabel Monday and it made me so grateful to have served a mission. Just knowing that Isabel got baptized, and nothing else, made my mission worth it. But I know that there's some joven boy out there who I'm going to find and baptized who's going to be my convert. I want to send out a missionary :-) (Isabel is engaged to be married one year after her baptism in Dec)

Elder Lohberg (his new DL) is great. We get along suuuper well hahahahaha. He's helping me alot with my comp and all that jazz, and I'm helping him with what I've learned about leadership from training Elder Guirola! :-)

Oh yeah I got the mp3 player! It's great :-)1. What has been your most significant tender mercy?The members. They are just so loving here! They honestly just love us. It makes me so grateful.
2. What are you looking forward to this coming week?Setting up an awesome missionary activity with the ward!!! It's gonna be a blast :)
3. Do you have a goal set for this coming week? Tell me about it.Just straightening everything out in the area, organizing everything and starting to work how we should...
4. Which scripture has had the biggest impact on you this week?Probably Ether 12:4, about how faith makes an anchor in our lives that's much more stable than the daily (or hourly) animo (excitement basically) that we feel. How even in hard times, with faith we'll have our sights set high.
Ahh! Touch the ark. President Wilkinson has taught that :-) You're like a seminary mission president mom ;-)
The lady who sent the photos last week is not our cook, but it's a family that we eat with twice a week (one dinner and lunch on Sunday) who loooves the missionaries. She knows Elder Saylor, too! And Elder Elms. They've both been in this area! how weird right?

Oh you'll probably be happy to know that Elder Guirola and I (who didn't get along at ALL to start) are really good friends now. We were in the multizone conference today together and we were chit chatting and everything as if we'd known each other forever. It makes me really happy that we overcame all our challenges and ended up seeing a lot of success before I left San Ramon :)

whelp my 'big' letter wasn't so big this week haha, hopefully I'll have a lot more to share this coming week.

I love you a ton mom! Thanks for always being the bomb dot com haha. Have a great week!

PS: I know the kid who took tori to Yule Ball. Don't know how, but i know him haha. He's cool :)

A few pics sent by the lady who feeds him twice a week