Today is the official day that weekly emails will start. Our Mission President (the man responsible for all 240 missionaries in the Antofagasta region of Chile) allows us to email for more than 1 hour, so I will continue to write lengthy weekly letters but also try to respond more to each of the personal responses I receive. As a reminder, I cannot check Facebook or any other social media responses/posts; therefore, if you wish to communicate with me, my email address is the fastest and most efficient way for this to happen.
Okay... so where to start...
I showed up to our pension (residence) late Wednesday night at about 3am and it was dark and we went to bed. I woke up Thursday and realized that it was nothing like I had thought the night before... I saw a pension that was humble (a few rooms and a bathroom) but that´s not what I´m talking about. The pension was FILTHY! (Thank you dad and mom for raising me to keep things clean... I think though you would´ve had a heart attack if you saw this). My guess is our pension hasn´t been cleaned in 12+ months... it smells, the ceiling in the bathroom is black, there is a noticable carpet of dirt on the ground, the walls all have drawings (like spray paint) from past Elders who used their fingers to remove dust and thus make drawings. Anyways, my companions idea of cleanliness is a little different than mine haha oh well. I guess he had lived here for a while now so he just got used to the dirtiness and it stopped bothering him. Funny short story... we were shopping for some stuff earlier and we went to buy cleaning supplies (there´s nothing except hand soap and body wash) to clean the pension and he picked up the toilet bowl cleaner which was labelled ¨extra strenght crud buster¨ or something... and he says, this should be good for the entire pension. He thought we could use toilet bowl cleaner to clean the glass, the floor, the ceiling, the bathroom... Haha anyways, I got a good laugh and explained to him that´s not the best idea :)
Thursday was slow and quite frustrating. Like you probably read in my last email, my companion only has a few more transfers (6 week blocks of time) in the mission than I so he´s still learning. Anyways, it was pretty disorganized and unplanned and thus unproductive. **by the way dad, you´d be proud - I have a lot of long lists going of stuff to do, things to buy, etc... who knew that writing things down and making to-do lists actually worked :) anyways, I learned to be patient and trust that things would get better... and they did. Thursday night we wasted a lot of time talking to this guy that told us the reason to the US economic success was the all-knowing eye in the pyramid on the back of the $1 USD, that Alcatraz doesn´t actually exist unless you believe in... *didn´t understand what the guy said*... and that the actors Matt Damon and *some other actor* are both famous guys from the Roman conquest, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WW1 and WW2... pretty much they are thousands of years old and just come back around when the world needs help. That took 45 minutes because Elder Harris thought we could get a return appointment with this guy and was determined to get one... I love Elder Harris though. He´s a great missionary who´s trying to show me the reins having barely just learned himself. That night we talked about how unproductive that day was, he apologized, and we woke up Friday with a different attitude and mindset.
Friday we stopped by about 10 peoples houses and talked with each of them for a few minutes. We taught 2 lessons that weren´t grand slam lessons but they still went well. We worked together better and things overall went better. A recent convert came along with us to our lessons which was awesome because he could share experiences he´s had (recent meaning a few years... he´s preparing to serve a mission). One of the investigators we taught is a man named Freddy. He´s about 55 and is very pensive. He always has this thin smile on his face when he talks, wears glasses, has a white beard, balding on the top of his head... He actually looks a lot like, has similar mannerisms to, and reminds me a ton of Mr Reiman (my AP US Gov teacher senior year). Freddy always takes a second before speaking and speaks from the heart and mind. It´s awesome. Friday we set a baptism date for August 30 which was way cool! He only has one leg and is in a wheelchair but lives across the street from the church so that makes it pretty easy to get him to church. We also taught a guy named Iguardo Hiresh, who owns a fruit stand, and that lesson went well too. It was a little difficult to teach because ocassionally he´d have to stop and help a customer but overall the lesson went well. He´s been very receptive with the missionaries and we set a baptism date with him for September 13.
Friday and Saturday are blending together a little in terms of lessons so I´m just going to keep talking about what we did, who we taught, etc... it´s no longer very chronological. Also, we´re teaching and contacting a lot of people but I´m only going to write about some of them.
We taught another guy named Roberto who owns a ¨local¨ (a small restaurant type of place...) and that lesson went really long but well. We also set a baptism date with him for September 13. Roberto initially 3-4 weeks ago (before I showed up) was hesitant to read the Book of Mormon because he thought the Bible was enough. But then one day he decided he would read a little bit, mostly out of curiosity, and ended up reading most of it. He´s grown a lot in these past few weeks and Elder Harris says he looks and acts like a different person already. He is happier and nicer to people, and a little more relaxed.
Church on Sunday was way awesome. Freddy came, stayed for all 3 hours, absolutely loved it - he read things, responded to questions, posed some questions... it was great! It was cool to be having church again in Spanish. :)
After church we had lunch with a part member family. The mom and daughter are members, the father and son are not. They are divorced but very kind to each other and their son is off at college a few hours away. Anyways, dad, mom, and daughter were there for lunch. They made a bunch of Chinese food (they´re from Bolivia... that makes sense right? haha apparently the dad goes online and learns how to make different foods from around the world... so cool!). It was really good too!! So at the end of this meal we asked if we could share a scripture... Elder Harris opened to 1 Nephi 8 and read about the vision of the tree of life, starting towards the beginning of the chapter (verse 7 or 8?) where it talks about wandering aimlessly until he realizes there´s a spacious campo... an angel appears to him and leads him through until he realizes there´s a tree with fruit and the vision continues... This man, named Mario, then told us that he grew up never believing in God. He went through some hard times as a child and believed that if God loved him, he wouldn´t have sufferred through those times. Then one night he had a vision in which first an angel appeared to him. He still had no idea who the angel was but in this dream he was told that God was real and that He loved Mario very much. Then one of his antepasados appeared to him and told him that God has a plan for he and his boy (this story was about 15 years ago) but his boy needed to grow up believing in God. The angel appeared again and told him to never forget this experience. So he joined the Catholic church. As we sat there listening I remembered a scripture from seminary, Ether 12:6,12, which says that proof doesn´t come until after a trial of our faith. I told Mario that obviously he has a lot of faith in God if this happened and all we want to do as missionaries is to help people´s faith in God grow stronger. He then asked if we could come back and teach him some more about what we believe!
The last story is way cool too. A man named Miguel, who has 22 or 23 years, has a very cool story. He realized he was lacking something in his life, then had this impression to pray. He did, and he had the impression he needed God in his life. So he started going to different churches. He felt God´s love, he felt happy, but still felt like there could be more. He walked into our chapel about 6 weeks ago and walked up to the Branch President and asked if there were paid people who taught non-members about this church´s beliefs. The Branch President clarified that no one is paid in our church... and then sent him to the missionaries :) as the missionaries taught him, he read the Book of Mormon in a few days, and specifically asked in the first lesson if the missionaries could teach him EVERY day for 2 weeks. (He travels for work and only had 2 weeks until he left on his next 30-day assignment). The missionaries taught him about chastity, the word of wisdom, prophets, and everything. With the Word of Wisdom, he said ¨yeah I know drugs are bad, don´t like alcohol or coffee or tea... I think honoring marraige covenants is important... how do i get baptized?). So he left for 30 days and is now back. Last night we taught again and we had a very unique lesson - we all bore our testimonies about how the Book of Mormon has changed our lives and how we know that God loves us and that Christ lives. Hermano Raul (the ward mission leader who is responsible for all the mission work in Tocopilla), was there and is such an awesome guy. The Spirit was so strong. That was the best experience I´ve had on my mission so far. It was one of those ¨wow...did that just happen?¨ experiences afterwards. Towards the end of the lesson I read a couple scriptures (2 Nephi 31 and 3 Nephi 27) and invited him to be baptized. He was worried that if he got baptized and then travelled he wouldn´t be able to go to church. I assured him that the church is in every city he´ll travel to so we set his baptism date for August 30 before he leaves again!
Btw, shout out to everyone that starts school today! Good luck, I´m praying for you, have fun, enjoy every minute. It flies bye so quickly. Secretly I´m a little jealous but also I´m loving my mission too much. I know this is exactly where I need to be. I already feel closer to Christ and my faith is stronger. Time is so weird... as long as we´re busy it flies, if not it drags out.
Love you all. Praying always for all of you. God lives and loves you.
Love,
Elder Campbell
Elder Campbell
Chile Antofagasta Mission
July 2014 - July 2016
