Learning and Growing

It has been a beautiful springy week here in 9 de Julio and another week of learning and growing so much.  

It was a challenging and incredible transfer where I learned to really rely on Heavenly Father and His ability to turn my weaknesses into strengths.  I will never be able to forget the counsel from "Elder" Williamson to Dan that Dan then in turn shared in her talk before leaving for the mission.  "Repent every day."  Such a simple little piece of counsel, but something that has really helped me to humble myself and become a better missionary and person than I ever could be without Jesus Christ.  Those moments in the morning and night when I talk with Heavenly Father about what I could have done better in the day and how I'm going to improve, asking for His help and guidance have strengthened me as I then go out and ACT.  

This week we have been blessed to find some really incredible people here in 9 de Julio.  One of them is Cintia.  She's from Paraguay and lives with her husband and two kids, Jacki who is 12 and Ezequiel who is 9.  The husband is never home because he works out in the campo days at a time, so we don't know him. But Cintia has such a good, open heart to learning more about the gospel. One of the challenges is that she and her husband aren't married and her husband never got divorced from his first marriage.  But it has been incredible to see how the Spirit works on people's hearts when they hear messages of pure truth.  In our first lesson, we taught Cintia about the 5 steps we take to follow Christ and invited her to be baptized.  She accepted and expressed how she feels like this is going to bless her life.  So in the next lesson, we didn't hesitate in teaching her the law of chastity.  I've seen that I've grown to become a much bolder missionary, and it was so refreshing and powerful to teach this commandment boldly and lovingly and invite her to keep it.  I realized that when we do things out of love, it doesn't matter how bold we are because the person will feel our love, without a doubt.  That was the case with Cintia.  Instead of getting scared off, she wanted to do things even better, and is working towards keeping this commandment.