We don’t have time for ANYTHING.
I was really frustrated because all of our investigators that we had found with Sister Villatoro… dumped us.
I can’t believe it still. Usually you get a baptism out of ONE of the people who go to church… I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Olga won’t get baptized yet.
I was praying the other day to ask Heavenly Father exactly what I needed to do in this day to have success because we NEED to baptize people!! And I was praying and praying in the morning and I wrote down all the ideas of things I thought I should do, and I got so excited I called some members about a reference that they had (it was like 7:00am in the morning… afterwards I remembered you shouldn’t call people that early in the morning…)
So I said, “Brother, have you had a chance to talk to that friend of yours to see if we can come visit him?”
“Uh… Como?”
“You’re friend…that we were going to visit? You talked with him?”
“Uh… Do you want to talk to my wife, Sister?”
“No, you remember your friend brother–” and then I remembered–I had called the wrong family–there are two Gutierrez families and I was calling the wrong one.
Oops.
“Sorry brother! I thought I was calling brother Edwardo!”
“Oh that’s all right, my wife actually has a referral for you.”
“Uh?”
So he passed the phone to his wife Ysela and we set up that we would go and contact her referral at like 4 o’clock.
Ok cool. Found a referral on accident…
We went through the day, including contacting this referral that lives way out in the mud and muck and it was rainy and wet and our feet were getting all stuck in there and I was like, “Oh my goodness, these people aren’t going to go to church! They live too far!” And finally when we reached there and started to share the brother was talking and talking and talking and he was like, “We could visit your church, but transportation would be necessary, and it will depend on the weather and blah, blah, blah…”
I was like… seriously!? Whatever, don’t have time. We’ll come back tomorrow. We asked Brother Esaul Ramirez to say the prayer, and he started the prayer, strumming his guitar as he prayed, “Dear Lord… we thank thee for this day… you are marvelous Lord…. we feel in our hearts the desire to serve thee…” blah, blah, blah. I tried not to laugh.
At the end of the day (terrible day) I was wanting to cry. Like, come on, Lord, we’re trying so hard, I’m trying to be obedient, why doesn’t anything work out still?
So we went back with the crazy family the next day, covered in mud and everything, and we brought Ysela with us and I was like, “so what do you do Sister Ysela, when sometimes people are unable to come and give you a ride to church?”
And she was like, “Well, we walk. That’s how we started. Before no one came for us. And lots of time we still have to walk.”
The family was like, Wow.
Ysela’s so great. She walks like 3 miles to church with her little children a lot when no one can give her a ride. So I was like, “All right, Brother, are we going to be able to excuse ourselves with Jesus Christ and say, ‘a car didn’t pass for me?'”
He laughed and he was like, of course not. So we invited them again to church, and blah, blah, blah excuses. And we were like, listen brother, someone’s going to pass by for you, you have nothing to do, what would keep from going to church?
Finally he was like, “All right, you got me.” And we all laughed.
Sunday morning they were getting ready for church when we came.
Wow.