Hello once again to all of my family and friends out there. I hope you are all doing well and that everything is going well at home. The Internet today is not functioning right, so you will probably be getting this on Monday night or Tuesday day. That's good ole Honduras for you…haha.
As a response to a few questions, my companion Elder Menendez is from El Salvador, so I have now covered every country in Central America as companions, the only other country I have left is Costa Rica, but since there are only 3 missionaries from Costa Rica in the whole mission, I think I've hit about all of them. My district consists of 6 Elders. Us, and the 4 Elders from Roble Oeste (2 of them being the Zone Leaders). Elder Menendez and I get along just great, I'm actually enjoying most of our time together.
This week for us was basically a giant roller coaster….filled with moment upon moment of excitement, disappointment, happiness, etc. On Tuesday we had interchanges with the Zone Leaders, and I was able to stay in my area in Pedregal and work with my new zone leader Elder Dahl from Ogden Utah. We had a great time together and worked great. He basically lived the same life as me so we were able to have some fun conversations.
During the interchanges we received a reference to teach someone named MartÃn. We decided to meet with him in the giant Catholic church right by our house, but he never showed up. We decided to head back home and call him to find out what happened. It turned out that he got held up in traffic (I'm still not used to the concept of "traffic" yet due to my large amount of time outside the city), and was about to get home. We were able to meet with him shortly after, and had a very spiritual lesson. He accepted the commitment to read and pray without any doubt. Sadly we haven't been able to meet with him since, because he has a bit of a crazy schedule, but we are going back today! I'm excited to find out how his progress has gone and to invite him to be baptized.
The roller coaster ride began and ended this week with the family of Ingrid and Leonardo. We spent most of the week running around getting all of the papers ready for the wedding this Friday, and we got it all done. It was a close call, and we even had to bribe the lawyer so that we could turn the papers in one day later. We finally got it all done, and we were all ready for the wedding. But, one day before the wedding, Hno. Leonardo fell back into the addiction and drank again...ugh. Hna. Ingrid said that she couldn't get married to someone that is not committed and hasn't changed. Leonardo lost himself for a day, but I used the Spirit to tell me when he was going to get home. At the end of the day on Thursday, when he arrived at his house, we were waiting for him. I calmly reprimanded him for a bit, and to make things short, he felt really bad afterwards. The wedding was cancelled, and the baptism of Hna. Ingrid....Thursday was one of the saddest days of my entire mission. They used their agency and chose to follow Satan that day, and I was victim of that agency. We did all we could, but things are still looking alright. The Hna. Ingrid still has her testimony and everything, so we're looking forward to the day when the Hno. Leonardo can really find a real repentance. We're going to focus on him this week and really try to get him to change. The good thing is, we still had the baptism of the 2 children of Hna. Ingrid, Allan (16) and Paola (11). It was a great baptism because every single one of the wards that go to our church (there are 4) had baptisms that day. We combined them all and had one large meeting, the picture that I have included is from the combined baptism... isn't that beautiful!
On Friday, I had the opportunity to have my first baptismal interview of one investigator in my district. His name is Efraim, a single man who is 38 years old. I was pretty nervous, but it turned out to be pretty good. He had trouble in his past with the Word of Wisdom, but I promised him that as he knelt down to pray each day to ask Heavenly Father for guidance, he would not fall again into the alcohol addiction. I really enjoyed the interview, and it was really strengthening for me.
Today, Elder Menendez and I decided to contact an entire bus! It was an interesting experience, since all of the buses are blasting rap music all the time, but we did it anyway. I screamed in front of the bus and we passed out flyers of what we teach. We're not really expecting to receive results from it, but we did it in order to get rid of any fear we have of talking to EVERYONE.
Well...I'm not sure if I'm going to be writing next week, because next Monday the leadership training starts once again. So if i don't write, it's for that reason. But sorry that this email is very short and to the point, but the Internet was really bad today. I love you all!
Vaya Pues!
Elder Tinkham
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