February 27, 2012

Dearest Royal Family, 

(Sue's note: Not sure what we are looking at.

Is it "la cucaracha"? See below)

Ha ha wow, that is Awesome! 21st Great-Grandson of King Edward III. Hey, if you trace your lineage to a royal line or two you can pretty much trace it back to Adam can’t you? Ha ha I think that is kind of cheating but I think that is really neat. Thanks. 

That is such a sweet photo of when you guys got married in the Temple. I am going to print it off today to share with people. 

Well, this week no baptisms. But a miracle can always happen. Sometimes investigators that are ready to be baptized fall from the sky. 

We are teaching a couple of families now. One is named Georgina and Francisco. Georgina came to an activity of the Stake Saturday. The activity was about the Plan of Salvation and was titled "A Trip to Heaven." She said she was a little bored waiting to go through the course (each step of the Plan of Salvation had its own room and a ward assigned to do it) but that she liked it in the end. She said she especially didn't want to go to the spirit prison or the Telestial Glory. Ha ha she said it scared her and her kid. 

I actually don’t know what they did, my comp and I could never go through, we were busy making sure everything went smoothly. I just know that one little girl left with her mom crying (good thing the mom is an active member). 

Yesterday we had a spiritual experience as we were in the street. We have been behind on our goal of finding new families to be able to teach, so Saturday night we made the goal to go crazy Sunday contacting new families in addition to doing all of our scheduled appointments after Church. 

We started the day off good because we contacted two families before even going to Church! And in the afternoon, we were hurrying to an appointment to the which we were already late when we passed by a man and a woman standing in front of a really big, deep hole in front of their house. 

We passed by the hole in a rush but I felt prompted to go back and talk to the man. It was easy to start the conversation, I told him I thought that was a pretty cool looking hole in front of his house ha ha ha. And that I always liked digging holes ha ha ha. But it turns out that the man and woman were neighbors. 

He lived next door with his wife and his three sons. (One is already married too). So I asked him if we could introduce ourselves to his wife too. Turns out they had received the charlas from the sister missionaries 10 years ago. But they moved to here and lost contact. So we are going to pass by this week and teach him and his son’s families. 

So... if the Spirit prompted me or I just really like holes, it’s the same thing. I have found that following the Spirit many times is just when you receive a prompting in your mind or heart to do a good thing, and you do that good thing. Like talking about holes with the intent to invite a family to come unto Christ. 

We usually try to help our male converts receive the Aaronic Priesthood the following Sunday. And then they have to prepare for some time to receive the Higher Priesthood. 

Hannah asked if I have ever been to the big lake to see the sharks. No! Never been to the big lake. But I have seen lots of Snakes! 

I think that is Asombroso that Jordan Harris got baptized Saturday. Tell Cooper congratulations from me too on his first baptism. The elbow of Yamileth, my first baptism, stuck out too ha ha. Dad, seems like you´ve got a couple of great future missionaries there (including Jordan) better keep it up with them so that they are good to go. 

Sounds like you are giving great lessons Dad, keep up the good work. Hey, make sure all your young men have a Preach my Gospel. I should send you a list of scriptures they should all try and memorize as quorums that help in the mission! Love you Dad. 

Ward Party! Good luck Mom. Hey tomorrow we are having the big "Night of Fortification" where all the different groups in the ward are going to come to the Church. And this month we even invited President Monestel! He and his wife are going to give the lesson, and President is going to meet an hour before with all the Priesthood to talk to them too. Pray that everyone shows up!!! Love you Mom. 

Alexis... no, nobody has ever proposed to any missionary here. The missionaries usually have to help all the families get married before they can get baptized. And the thing is, I was blessed with brown eyes. Here, everybody has brown eyes too and they go crazy for the missionaries with "cat eyes" (colored eyes). Especially blue. Love you Alexis. 

Hey good luck with Dance Concert and Piano Emily! I luh You! 

Wow Hannah, great job with your Amelia Earhart report, and good luck with your performance as Cinderella! I hope you guys are videotaping all of the performances the family does so I can see them later. Like the "Mixed up Fairy Tales" Love you. 

Love, 

Elder Hardy 

p.s I love you

February 20, 2012

I am doing great! 

Here with my new compañero (but I told him that after the first 2 days you aren’t new anymore). The best news is... 

We baptized a Family!!!!!

Well, a couple of months ago, a Priesthood holder came back to church after many years. We were able to help him and get to know his family. At the end of the last month, we baptized Yuran, his Grandson.

We have been working with his wife (who was not a member) and having a real wrestle trying to help her finally make the decision to be baptized. She has been thinking about it for about 12 years (since her husband was baptized). 

It was one of the best baptisms I have ever been able to help with in my mission. She was baptized and confirmed yesterday and she even shared her testimony afterwards and it made me so happy. 

Wednesday, my comp and I are going to Managua for a Conference for the Missionaries that are training and being trained. I bet you we will get our packages there!

Ward responsibilities? Um, well I guess I could be the pianist. Elder Kunz (who actually knows how to play) left last month. So we haven’t had anyone to do it. But Elder Muzo is doing it right now. The best part is that it is electronic. He actually has no idea how to play, but he pretends he is playing and I don’t think many members have realized it yet. 

We give the Gospel Principles Class sometimes when the teacher doesn’t show up, but the best part about Jinotepe is that it is already a Stake. So they are actually pretty self sufficient. 

My best experience? Well the best was yesterday when María Concepción got baptized, confirmed as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and received the Holy Ghost!

The worst experience is when you have taught very powerfully to a family and come back to the next appointment hoping that they tell you they know everything is true and want to follow Jesus Christ and be baptized, but instead they hand you the Book of Mormon and ask you to never come back. 

Ha ha yeah the questions are great. I just feel like I don’t have the time to answer them my very best. But don’t worry, the Book is BLUE the Church is TRUE and Families can be GLUED, together forever and I have the chance to share it with the families in Nicaragua for 6 MORE MONTHS! Nothing negative to share. :) 

I have a question: We are going to help Maria Concepcion and her Husband Agustin put a goal to go be Sealed in the Temple in one year. Do you think you could send me some photos of your temple marriage Mom and Dad?

I know you’ve got a dorky hair do (Sue’s note: gee thanks! haha) but I think it would be really special for me if I could share it with them and tell them about what blessings are awaiting their family. If you send them to my email I can print them off here. 

Ha ha ha you guys bought a cat! That was really nice, I am sure Grandma Weiler is very happy. (Rob too). 

Hey, Congratulations Emily on the killer talk you gave Sunday!!! Sounds like it was great. That is really neat, no. That is AWESOME that you have a friend that is going to get baptized. You will have to tell him "Felicidades" from me. Make sure you help support him so that after his baptism he can keep strengthening his testimony and prepare to go on a mission. That would be so cool. Tell him he’s got to keep on reading that little blue book. 

Ha ha ha ha the water heater BLEW up?!?!?! That is Crazy. I remember in myth busters when they did that and it went through the roof! How far did ours go? (Ha ha I also seem to remember them saying that it is pretty much impossible to happen unless you deliberately tamper with the emergency pressure release valve... hmmm). But I am totally jealous that now we have a new water heater that will never run out! Only after I left the house.... 

Hey Dad, good work with the Young Men! That is neat that your young friend is going to come back to church. Help him feel comfortable there in the ward. And make sure he has a good relationship with the Bishop too ha ha. 

Hey, I don’t know how the Young Men would react, but one thing I wish I would have been able to do more before the mission is get to know the Book of Mormon better. It is actually a pretty cool book. But I’m not sure yet how to make it fun for the Young Men to be able to read it more. 

I know that when I get back, we are going to have a family Book of Mormon quiz every once in a while. President did that with the missionaries once, he and his wife did like a hundred questions about the Book of Mormon and it was pretty fun how we played a game to see which Zone knew the Book of Mormon best. I love you. 

Wow Mom, the Big Band Night sounds great! I bet you it will be fun! I hope I haven’t forgotten completely how to play the Saxophone. This Saturday we are doing a Stake Missionary Activity. It is called something like: A Trip to Heaven. And each ward has assigned one of the parts of the Plan of Salvation. I think we are the Terrestrial Kingdom. And everybody is going to do a tour of the Plan of Salvation. I love you. 

Good work with the Cat, Alexis! I love you. 

Sounds like you are having fun, Emily. Congrats on the talk again. Keep stretching so that you don’t hurt a muscle again! I love you. 

Hello Amelia Earhart! That will be neat Hannah. Send me a photo! I love you. 

I love you all, 

Elder Hardy

ps I love you

February 13, 2012

¡Feliz Día de Cariño! (o de San Valentin)

Hey everybody, Happy Valentine’s Day!

Hannah asked what the Nicaraguans do for Valentine’s Day? Well, as far as I know it is like what we do in America. More than anything it is for couples. Give a little gift or something. For us the missionaries, it is one of the holidays that we especially don’t really celebrate ha ha. 

Does Elder Batz speak English? No, but he is learning really fast. He is really motivated to learn English and always works in his missionary English book when he should. I will tell him the root of his name. I asked him once and he said he had no idea. His dad is from the same place in Guatemala. 

Last night we had a great experience with a family teaching them the Restoration! They are a little bit older couple, we actually contacted them through their daughter and her husband. 

One night we were walking to our dinner appointment looking for families. We passed by one house and it looked like a family. I was like, hey I think that was a family. And my comp. was like, listen, I think they are fighting. But we went and talked to them anyway. They were getting ready to leave with their kids and a stroller but when we came and presented ourselves at the door they said, oh come on in. And we talked to them for a couple minutes. 

Well, it turns out that the super chosen family lives in the Sister’s area. But the next time we passed by we got to know the parents of them that live there in our area. And so last night, we were answering a lot of their questions and stuff like that. 

Finally the Mom asked the inspired question, So how did your church start? What makes your Church so different from all the others? And so we gladly started from the beginning and taught them. It was a great lesson because we didn’t really teach a lesson, we taught them. There were lots of questions and it was a conversation. 

And in the end as we testified, we felt really good. And the best part was that it seemed like they understood really well. And the next time we come back, we will see if they are ready to follow the example of Jesus Christ. 

Hey you will need to tell Aunt Debbie thanks from me for being so nice and giving me a Hardy Boys book from 1965? That is awesome! I think my Hardy Boys book collection is sweet. 

Do I ever get snail mail letters or write back? Ha ha ha well, the snail mail letters are awesome, they always seem to be more than an email. But I guess I might have been slacking off a little bit in writing back... 

Sounds like everyone is doing great!!! 

Thanks for the updates, sorry I don’t have time to write everyone back individually. 

I love you all, 

Elder Hardy 

ps. I love you

February 6, 2012

Hey Gringlandias!

That is awesome that you are sending the Greenie Package. I hope he gets it. I will try and explain it to him. Sounds like some cool object lesson that you are going to send us. That will be perfect for training and maybe even for District Meetings.

Elder Batz and I don’t have too many photos, we have been pretty busy this week. I had Leader Council on Wednesday, Interviews on Thursday and Zone Conference on Friday. Ha ha so we have been packed. But we will take more photos. The photos I sent are a human pyramid we did in the Interview Conference to show why "Fundamentals" are so important.

We had a good experience yesterday. So sometimes in the mission you just have one of those days. You know, when it seems like everything is going bad. People reject you, all your appointments fall, your backpack starts getting heavy and your feet hurt and it seems like nothing is going right. Here in Nicaragua it’s called un día Salado. A "Salty" day. 

Well, yesterday was a pretty "Salty" day. We got up and left the house extra early to go pass by our families to make sure the adversary didn’t throw anything in the way so that they wouldn’t come to church. But in short, we ended up having extra time on our hands before church started. We even found one family (our most positive for being baptized this month) in the street on the way to their house. 

But our one family was dressed up and everything and we asked them where they are going, church doesn’t start for another 2 hours. And they told us that the family had called with work and so they were going to another city for the day to work. And then they told us they were talking and that they decided that they didn’t want to talk to us anymore. So we shared our testimonies and gave them the special edition Liahona about the Book of Mormon that we brought for them.

In short, not all the families came to church and for the rest of the day all of our appointments fell and we were pretty salty. BUT, in spite of that, we didn’t lose hope and decided we needed more faith. And we decided that we needed to find a new family before going to eat dinner and we did it!

We found a really nice new family, we explained why we were there and they invited us in. We talked about the plan of salvation with them and it turns out that the missionaries even lived in the house of the grandma a couple years ago. It was great. And at Dinner we decided that instead of getting "salted" we needed to be the Salt of the world and keep finding chosen families. Because when the life gives you rice and beans... you got to make Gallo Pinto.

Um, yeah I think I’ve had companions celebrate birthdays while we were together, but only with one or two. I think with Elder Valenzuela we went to eat pizza. You know with most of my compañeros their birthdays have not been in our time together (max time together has been 3 months).

Yes, President kept me as the District Leader. Which makes a little more work. Especially because I do divisions with the district and Elder Batz is still getting to know the area. In our District are Elder Muzo and Elder Nielson (Zone Leaders) Elder Hardy and Elder Batz, Elder Buc (training) and Elder Bray (New, from California), Elder Burrola and Elder Reyes, and the Sisters Hermana Vasquez and Hermana Rivas.

Sick days? NO!!! There are no sick days. I have been great. And with my new compañero we even did exercise today and we are planning to keep it up.

Hannah asked if I have had any jungle diseases? Ha ha no never anything too weird. The worst Jungle disease that I have gotten is the Picazón. Or the "Itches." Ha ha but that just means I should probably wash my sheets, put my mattress in the sun and put baby powder where it itches after taking a shower. But the worst I have heard of is that of a missionary getting is Dengue Fever. That’s no fun. But here where I am there aren’t many mosquitoes.

Hey I love you so much, thanks for the updates and the great object lesson Idea. I think I am going to use it tonight.

Love,

Elder Hardy

ps I love you