Cucuta, a place to do what is needed, not whatever you want - or so the sign says.

Interesting sign in Cucuta  (14 July 2014)

 (If you want to do whatever you want please leave Cucuta)

hey family, what is up? Life is pretty good here. I do not have any complaints. The independence day of Colombia was yesterday and nobody did anything and I thought to myself surely this means something. If the people do not love their country enough to celebrate its birth, surely that must say something about the quality of the country hmmmmm.... idk.

We had a baptism set up for 2 weeks  ago, I didn't tell you last week because I didn't write anybody because we were buying stuff for a missionary activity. Our investigator got chicken pocks right before her baptism . . . so we are going to baptize her this Saturday. We are working hard here.

 

The biggest problem that exists here is that the people are not married. Almost nobody is married by law. We have 3 people who want to get baptized but can't because the are not married and living with someone and have kids with this person and can't separate . . . so I hope that we are going to marry a lot of people in the following weeks. We will see. We are working on it. 

 

I do not know how it is in other missions or other areas but in my experience people we come up to me without having known me before and will introduce themselves to me and then tell me their life story and all their problems . . . and that is a little weird that people seek counsel from a 20 year old stranger from another country who they have known for 5 minutes . . .

I think it is weird that we the missionaries who do not have a whole lot of life experience have the trust and confidence of members and investigators and strangers and that these people want our help to fix their lives.

 

Jonathon one of our investigators told us, 'I do not want to get married. I have never like the idea and have never thought of myself as being married.' We taught the plan of salvation and I shared D&C 131 or 132 (i don't remember which) (and this is not something I would advise sharing usually but I don't know, I felt it) which says in the celestial kingdom there are 3 degrees and to obtain the highest we have to be married. The next time we came to the house he told us 'Elders i am thinking about getting married and I have created a plan to save money to buy a ring.' So that was really cool.

 

Yah, its the vida misional. Doing what has to be done.  

Love, Elder Rallison