Sept. 24, 2012

Hola familia, This week was a pretty crazy week for us. We traveled out to Santa Cruz as a zone Tuesday at four in the afternoon. It was pretty fun going as a zone. We all ate dinner together and we talked and got to know everyone a lot better. Everything was good. We slept pretty well and once we were on the train for about 15 minutes, the engine on the train broke down and we had to wait for two hours. It was pretty crazy because it was raining really hard outside and water was leaking into the train too. But after awhile, they came with another train behind us to push us to the train station. We were in the train for about 18 hours. It didnt stop raining at all so we ended up waiting around the train station for another 2 hours. We finally ended up getting taxis to take us to the hotel that we were going to sleep in. But we did get to the meeting just on time to start and Elder Usedo from the Seventy came and was the speaker during the conference. He was such an awesome speaker and he's really good at teaching. He focused in all of the things that we needed to do to become better missionaries. We could truly feel the spirit really strong during the meeting. We were able to fly back in a plane from the meeting in Santa Cruz. It was still somewhat hot when we arrived, but a little of the cold front from Santa Cruz was making it's way over. Then the next night it rained so hard with really loud thunder. It made our weather here feel pretty good. But it has now gotten way hot agian. We had a pretty good experience with a pastor of one of the largest churches here in Bolivia. It's called the "Asembly of God from Bolivia". We taught this pastor about the restauración. We  taught him and testified to him that we are members of the true church of Christ that is here on this earth today. He then asked me "so are you telling me that I'm wrong and my church is false, and that my baptism wasn't correct?" At this point I was wondering, wow what am I going to tell him? I just felt inspired that I should tell him to ask God. To our astonishment, his face and his eyes lit up and he said "that is a really good answer. We need to ask God." He said he had never done that and that he thinks it would be a good idea because he had never done that ever before. We then took out the book of mormon to show him the proof that God has given us to show that His kingdom is here on the earth today. We opened up the book of mormon and shared with him a couple verses from second Nephi 23 and in 25, 26, and 29. While reading this he became very amazed about the doctine in the book of mormon and how much it talks about our savior Jesus Christ. He said, "this is marvelous!  I didn't know you guys had this doctrine in your church." Then we both testified that the kindgom of God has been placed here on the earth again for the preparation of the second coming and that Jesus Christ is at the head of His church. We told him that he will become to know of these truths if he comes unto Christ and asks his Heavenly Father. We gave him a book of mormon and we made another appointment to come back. We pray that he will continue to have these desires to know of the truth. We are working hard and really trying to find a family that needs the gospel in their lives so that we can be tools in the Lord's hand to guide them and help them take steps to enter into the straight and narrow path. I have a very strong feeling of peace inside of me that God will bless us no matter what happens, and that He will provide the way. I Hope that all of you have an awesome week.    Love,   Elder Christoffersen