Dear Family,
Well, this week has been a great week in Laredo! After working hard and having a few difficulties along the way, I think we've finally started our way out of our rut. We've had a rough time ever since I got into the area here in Larga Vista, but this last week we saw some success and hopefully it will keep going that way.
I spent about a month and a half in this area trying to figure out what I could do or improve in order to find people that wanted to learn about the gospel and live it. But, after a lot of introspection and trying out different ideas, I think I finally found out what it was. I feel like I was relying too much on myself and not enough on the Lord. I felt the need to have the Spirit with me and was doing everything I could to have it. During the past few weeks I was too focused on me changing myself in order to have success, when really I should have learned to draw more on t he Lord's strength. I would always think about what I needed to change and do better rather than just trusting in the Lord to make up for my weaknesses. I'll never be a perfect teacher, and though I'm trying to be, it comes down to trusting in the Lord enough to make up for whatever part I'm missing.
This week we started to have more frequent, more sincere prayers, which I felt helped to invite more of the Lord's help as we showed that we were humbling ourselves before Him and asking for His help. We made a rule that we couldn't leave the far without saying a heartfelt prayer first. We would always pray before we left the apartment and in lessons of course, but I just felt that the added companionship prayer before any session of teaching or tracting helped us to not trust in ourselves quite as much. This week we found a few new investigators, none of which were too solid, but the real miracle came through our less active work. We had been working with the less actives a lot and were hoping that they would finally have the desires and circumstances that would permit them to return to activity. During this week we started visiting the less-active members in El Cenizo (a small town about twenty minutes south of our area). We were able to find a small group of members who were ready to come back to church. On Sunday, we had seven less active members come to church which was a great blessing from the Lord. Also, we received a few referrals from the members in this area, which was amazing, considering we hadn't had any from the branch since I've been in Laredo.
It made for a great week and I'm grateful for the blessings the Lord has seen fit to give us. I only hope that we can keep doing our part to trust in Him and have Him make up for our weaknesses.
I'm sending home a few pictures from this week that I thought were pretty good. One is a picture of a billboard in Laredo, that I thought was funny considering it's in Spanish and it's right next to the big American flag next to the border. It translates to "Budweiser, keep being the king," and the Mexican guy on it just makes it even better. Another is a picture of the HUGE Mexican flag they fly on the other side of the border. I mean really, it puts our flag to shame a little bit. I figured Texas would be down for the biggest flag ever, but apparently Nuevo Laredo has us beat. The other two are pictures of the Rio Grande River hat runs by the town El Cenizo we were working in this week. With all the immigration issues, I thought it was funny that it was just open. We saw about ten people just chilling next to the Rio fishing. The border patrol has these camera towers near the river that watch in and you can always see their SUVs rolling around, but I just thought it was funny.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a great week. Thanks for all your support and prayers!
(Editorial note: AOL has recently been rejecting all my mail with attachments, so we did not get any pictures. This letter was sent again by Roland w/o the pictures. We've fixed this problem, so should we get any additional pictures in the future, I will post them to the blog.)
Love,
Elder Wood
