Hey
Guys!
This week has been a
little frustrating. Truthfully, much of the past month and a half has been
frustrating, too, because it's annoying when no one wants to listen to you.
People don't want to commit themselves to God, even though they like it that we
visit them and we share the spiritual messages we always share... it's
difficult. Day after day, week after week without visible results can kinda bug
you sometimes. So I'm a little frustrated with that, and very tired.
Today, I'm gonna tell
you guys about one of the strangest investigators I have ever had: Edgar Moises
Gomez Cordon. He is a 31-year old guy who always walks around with a crutch
that he never uses, a radio he rarely uses, and a bottle of spray paint. The
first time i taught him was in November. He had been coming to Santo Tomas for
about 3 months and the sister missionaries there were too scared of him to want
to teach a lesson, so we invited him one day to go to the chapel of Puerto
Barrios so we could teach him after the Sunday reunions. As Elder Reyes and I
went to teach him for the first time, we very quickly realized that he could
not sing on pitch or with a rhythm, and that whenever we would ask him to read
a scripture, he would almost shout what he was reading, substituting random
parts of the scripture with his full name. We weren't quite sure what to do
with this guy, so after some discussion with President Crapo, we decided that
it would be best if we left the teaching to the branch president of Santo Tomas
would teach him.
A couple months later,
while I'm walking down the road with my companion to the next appointment, the
branch president of Santo Tomas, President Maying, pulls up in his truck.
"Elder Reed! You're just the man I wanted to talk to!"
He got out of his
truck and said:
"Ok, Elder.
There's a man who assists Santo Tomas who comes to my office evey day. He asks
me what he has to do to be baptized, and I can't deny baptism to anyone, but
the guy's... weird.."
So I asked him,
"Is his name Edgar Gomez?"
"Exactly!!!"
So, to help President
Maying out, we're teaching him again. It's always a very bizarre experience to
go teach Edgar Gomez but it's fun.
I've been thinking
lately this week about our identity as children of God. The Holy Spirit gives
testimony to us that this is true. If we really consider that we are the
spiritual offspring of a Heavenly Father who loves us, why would it be weird or
strange to consider that we have God-given talents that can help us prepare for
the day when Christ comes? There is an innate power within each one of us that
comes from God. the greatest talent of all is called spirituality, and it is
defined as the capacity to discern between right and wrong and follow the right.
As we exercise this talent and develop it, we gain a stronger and a clearer
vision of who we are and what God wants us to become. Our personality grows, we
become kinder, more thoughtful, and more willing to serve. We make people feel
good about themselves and help them to realize the vision that we have obtained
and then comes the perfect day, when Christ comes. when we see Him, we will be
like Him, because we will have worked and we will be pure, even as he is pure.
Let the vision be born
in you. And when it is born within you, don't let it slip away.
--
Elder Jeffrey Reed
No comments:
Post a Comment