Week 66 - Sta Margarita 9/18/2012

so this week not a lot of lessons but we had some crazy stuff happen and it has made me start thinking of how mysterious God is in everything that he does we have had some crazy encounters lately with people being close to dieing or losing fingers and its just crazy that it is all happened in two weeks so with sister ariola she is fine and so is her trainee sister bogenschutz but the crazier stuff happened later in the week but ill start with one thing that i have been struggling with lately with our investigator her name is mavie tan and she is 10 her parents are members but she never got baptized because there was no church in Gandara for almost 10 years so she never got baptized but she is awesome and always pays super close attention when we are teaching but she wont talk when we are teaching im having to learn how to read lips in another language and its way hard we dont know why she wont talk while we are teaching because as soon as we are done she talks to us and when we ate lunch at their house she was talking about school and everything but she reads the BofM every day and her parents said she prays every night before bed which is awesome she is an awesome example to everyone but she just wont talk oh well and with that thing dad said about the trees they used that here when we started the rescue and retention program as missionaries the said the roots are the doctrines of the gospel and what happened here in the Philippines is the roots werent deep and the trunk which is priesthood wasnt wide but there were tons of branches being thrown on the branches are the other members so with out deep roots in the doctrine and without priesthood the church cant stand it needs roots and priesthood first then we can start adding more members or branches to the tree and its so true thats why our group in gandara is great there are 5 Melchizedek priesthood and only like 40 members but sta margarita has like 300 members and only 3 Melchizedek priesthood so not good but they are starting to get it we are having a missionary fireside on saturday and the members have all been asked to bring a non-member friend or less-active member its going to be awesome the members are wanting to work with us now but we have just been so busy working in other areas that we havent had the chance to work with them but we have plans for this week so now for the crazy stuff on thursday we went to a member but the dad wasnt home so we couldnt teach but the reason he wasnt home was because he almost cut 3 of his fingers off and was getting a check up to make sure it wasnt infected and then we taught an awesome lesson to a less-active young women and her siblings while her parents where outside talking to their friends and she is going to teach her parents the plan of salvation and then invite them to listen to the lessons and get baptized too its going to be awesome but then we got a ride home and the dad that was at the hospital earlier was on his way back but not for him this time it was for his grandson who got run over by a motorcycle and got a bunch of stitches in his head he is good now thought just lots of road rash and then the mom and most of her kids were at church on sunday so cool we almost had 50 attendance in santa margarita then what happened in Gandara is so crazy i dont know how any of them survived ill be sending pictures of this we had an appointment with some investigators at 1 and so we were running a little late and as we turned the corner to where there house is the house couldnt be seen anymore it was underneath a giant bus so we got out and found the dad and asked what happened he said that his wife and 3 of thier kids were taking a nap and aparently the driver of the bus needed to take a nap too and he dozed off and when he came back to he paniced and went of the road and the bus was going to fast he ripped a coconut tree in half he didnt even take out the roots it was a clean cut all the way through like some one used a saw or something and then he went through their little tiny house then hit another coconut tree and and that stopped the bus on top of their house with them underneath this is after mom quite her job so she could go to church on sunday so they have no money and turns out she was reading the plan of salvation pamphlet while her kids where sleeping and then thier house got run over by a bus they have a few cuts and bruises but for the most part they are ok and now they have 15,000 pesos to rebuild their house which is way more than their house was worth so total blessing in disguise and it shows them that if they do all they can to serve God he will protect them and we decided we are really going to start focusing on that family and get them baptized as soon as possible they are amazing and then we had to go to Tacloban sunday night so that my companion could get his check-up since he is going home in like 2 weeks its crazy that we actually go home so weird. but on thing that i learned this week froma study i had from Alma he said in chapter 35 that the people became offended because of the strictness of the words of God and the first thing he does in the next chapter is remind his family about living the gospel before he goes and teaches others about it so i was thinking i ask people every week to have family prayer and scripture study and FHE but i dont know that that is happening at home so i just want to to promise you all that if you have those things and we follow the things we have been asked to do we will be blessed even if we dont understand why but it wont matter at the last day whether we understood why but that we did what we were asked thats important so i love you all and know that this is something thats hard but it is possible and if we do the things we need to before the things we want to do God will bless us even more than ever well thank you for the email and mom i dont know if ill even speak english when i go home so that it wont matter lol just kidding but dont worry about it thats a long ways away