Dear Family and Friends,

 

   I really enjoyed all of the pictures and love that I received from the emails this week. It feels good to hear all of your love and support for me. Sorry for not being able to send more pictures to you guys but my camera broke this week. I don't know what happened to it but one day it was working fine and the next it just wouldn't turn on. I still have my SD card though so when I get a new camera I can send you pictures again.

    This last week my companion and I had some pretty good success in our teaching. During our weekly planning we thought that we should concentrate on teaching the less-active members of our branch here in Lira so we decided to dedicate at least one lesson a day on less-actives. By the end of the week we had taught 8 less-active members and 7 of them came to church this Sunday for the first time in a long time (for some of them it had been over a year since they had last come to church). One of these people we taught, named Gloria (different from the other Gloria mentioned last week),  no one had seen in over two years, but prior to becoming less-active she had been very active and was even preparing to serve a mission. Missionaries and home teachers alike had passed by her house several times since then but had always been unsucsessfull in their attempts to bring her to church. Elder Cardon and I felt like passing by her house on the way back from an appointment and to see if she was home. We found her, and at first she was a bit reluctant to see us, but then her older brother (we had never met him before) who was there was very excited to see us and welcomed us in with open arms. We decided to share with her about the Savior, His love, and the atonement power of Jesus Christ. We sealed our lesson with our testimonies and the spirit was so thick after, you could practically feel it like fog surrounding us. She ended up breaking down and crying and telling us about how when she used to be active in the church and getting ready to serve a mission she had accidentally gotten pregnant. She had felt so ashamed about it that she left the church in fear of judgement of others and she said that she had felt "unworthy to come to church". We shared with her a scripture from the Book of Mormon about putting trust in the lord during our trials, and we explained that we were representatives of Jesus Christ and would do anything in our power to be able to help her. We also told her that our branch president was a man called of God and that he would be able to help her through her troubles as well (we introduced her to our branch president on that Sunday). It was such a cool experience, and even her brother (who sat in on the whole meeting) came to church that Sunday. He sat next to me during Sunday School where the lesson that day was about baptism, and asked me after class when could he be baptized. Since then we've set up appointments with him to give him the lessons preparing him for baptism. It was such a cool experience overall and really lifted up my whole week.

    This week has also been a little difficult over the last few days. Transfers have been changed again this week so rather than get transfer news on Friday, and Transferred on Monday, we now find out transfer news on Wednesday morning and then get transferred either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday night. For me I don't mind the change to much, but for everyone else in our apartment they're really mad at this change and at the mission president. It gets tiring to have to listen to everyone complaining about it, and for the other set of missionaries I can see a visible change in their work ethic because of this.

     I'm so gratefull for all of your love and prayers that I've felt this week. There have been times where I've been able to feel the prayers helping me to stay safe and to be able to work harder in this mission and I really appreciate it.

        Love-

                 Elder Grilliot