Numero 70 ~ 2nd Christmas Skype

entry by Lisa: 

John sounded great!! It was wonderful to talk and SEE him. His same personality is still there.  :) We had lots of laughs together on the call as we got to visit with him. He shared with us some of his experiences and let us know he is doing really well. He loves the people and the work in Nicaragua. 

We miss him terribly! I am already looking forward to next Christmas to have him home. As much as well all miss him, we know he is needed there. He is blessed and happy to be serving the people there. 

Let the countdown to August 2nd begin! 

2016 is gonna be a busy year for the Sherle family!

Numero 69 ~ Reason for the Season

Well friends and fam. It is the christmas season. We are missing a little snow down here in Nicaragua but hey gotta take what you get i guess. 

This week was decent. 

The baptisms we had set up fell through because one went to Waspan and the other had a ton of work in the hospital so she didnt have time. She did come to church though so we will see if she gets baptized this weekend. 

We found a cool family in our area. It is huge! Probably around 20 and there are some less actives there and some non members so we are going to be working there more now. They are pretty cool. It is just hard to get the whole family to sit down at once and listen to us but we will see what we can do to try to get all of them to listen to our message. 

This week was a pretty normal week. Not much happened. I dont really know what else to talk about the week haha.

This week is christmas i am so pumped! 

I have definitely come to know the real reason for christmas and the beauty of it. 

I hope we can all remember why we celebrate christmas and who we do it for. I hope we can all strive to be a little bit more like him and try to come a little closer unto him. I know that is is for our Savior that we are here today and that you are all blessed to be with your families through the holiday season. 

I love the scripture in Isaiah 9:6 that says "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be on his shoulders, and his name shall be Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace". 

I love you all. I hope you can all share some laughs and fun during this time. 

Elder Sherle

Numero 68 ~ new 2nd Counselor

Hey fam! how is it going?? 

This week was awesome! Full of miracles!

As you will see in the pics I sent. We baptized the 3 people we planned. We had the wedding of the family and then baptized them right after. Also, we baptized the 23 year old named Efrain. It was so cool. I baptized all of them. Efrain was the biggest guy I have ever baptized in my mission. He is like 6´4. He is a big boy. He told me he loves basketball too so I guess it was just meant to be!

The baptisms were cool because we didnt have to pass by for any of them to bring them to their baptism and we didnt ever have to pass by on sunday for them to come get confirmed. That pretty much never happens here. They made things very stress free for us! It was a pretty sick wedding because there was another couple that was going to get married so we just did it at the same time with the same attorney! At the baptism, I saw a guy who was getting baptized and this guy was an investigador I had here right when I got to this area. I brought him to general conference and he loved it. I went back and we taught him about baptism and he was willing, but then moved and I never saw him again. On Saturday I saw him walk into the church and I asked him what he was doing and he shook my hand and told me he was getting baptized and was going to change his life. He gave me a big hug and looked so happy. It made me feel so good to see him again. After so much time of not seeing him and the other missionaries found him and helped him out. 

I was really happy to baptize this family. I have found pride in baptizing families and this is the first family I have baptized in Puerto. It is such a great feeling baptizing a family. 

This month we have a goal of baptizing 7 people. We put our goal really high and we are exercising a lot of faith. As of right now, we are at 4 baptisms. We never measure people as numbers but we always put goals to help ourselves work hard to find the people the lord has prepared for us. We have a couple weeks left and feel like we can do it. With the faith anthing is possible. 

Starting next week we are going to be seeing some changes here in Puerto. We are now going to have 2 meeting for just our ward. One in the morning in spanish and one in the afternoon of just miskito. It will be good now because we will have a better control of the members here and be able to help themand support them better, especially the ones that dont understand spanish very well they will benifit a lot more going in the afternoon in their own language to learn more about Jesus Christ. Our branch president had a meeting with us too this week and said he needed us to do more in the branch so he called me to be the 2nd Counselor of the branch and called my comp to be the Secretary of the branch. It is going to be so fun to be part of the branch presidency because I will be able to know the needs of the branch better. So we will see how that goes. We are not sustained yet but next sunday they will sustain us, so im really not suppost to tell any of the members her until we get sustained. Good stuff!

I hope everyone is enjoying the christmas season! It will be a good one! We always need to remember the Lord in all the things he has given us. It is a special season! I love christmas so much!!!!!

love yall!

Elder Sherle

Numero 67 ~ It's been a great week here in Puerto

 

hey fam! It has a been a great week here in Puerto Cabezas.  

We saw a lot of miracles this week. First off, we had a meeting with President. It was a zone conference. He came to talk to us and help us in the work. I honestly love meetings with President. He told us that the lord wants us to advance the work and that we can double baptisms and establish the church and told us what we can do better to have more success. I think I like visits by President because i spend every day teaching people but when he comes its like him teaching me. He told us that if we have the faith we can find a family every week to baptize this month. Something that stuck out to me was that he told us that we cant do this work alone. He told us that we need to communicate with the Lord and tell him what we need and work with him so that we can have success. The Lord prepares his children and it is our duty to find them and help them come unto Christ.

We had the blessing to baptize this kid named Christian. His whole family are members of the church so we had a cool little baptism for him on Saturday. It was a nice little baptism. We had it just with his family and one of our investigadors.

We had another week of success here in our area for investigadors at church. We had 5 people with baptismal dates and 4 of them came to church. The other one didnt because she is in Managua still so that was super good that they came. We have three people to baptize this week. A family named Juan and Asucena and another guy named Efrain. They came to church and all seem ready to go so it should be a great week this week.

Last night, we had changes. Only 1 missionary came this change and 18 left so the mission got even smaller. Now we only have 20 missionaries in the zone and when i got here there was 26. It feels a lot different now.

The devotional last night was good. I love christmas music so much. We got it going in the house and I love it. Just a few more weeks and we will be there!

Love you all!

Elder Sherle

 

 

Numero 66 ~ Thanksgiving Crepes

Pamiliki nahki sa? Pain baman!

Miskito is so hard! But im getting a little bit down!

We had a decent week here in Puerto!

Well this week was Thanksgiving. The best thing was Thanksgiving fell on Thursday which is weekly planning day so we got our district together with another district in the zone and we had a cool little activity in the morning at church. We decided to do a breakfast. So my comp likes to cook so he decided to make everyone crapes! We got there early and starting busting out crapes for everyone! We had to make 42 crapes! I say we because helped crack the eggs and mix and helped prepare so i took part in the action too! haha also the sister missionaries made bananna shakes and some other elders made hashbrowns! It was a good little breakfast! I had never really had crapes before but they were really good! I put a lot of powdered sugar and syrup and all that good stuff on it so it was a nice treat! Then we all planned together and just chilled for a little bit. It was pretty good for what we got here in Nicaragua so we were really grateful.

In the Thanksgiving spirit, I want to tell you guys that I am so thankful for all the help you have given me and all the love you have shown me. I am most grateful for my Lord and what he did for me and the oportunity I have to serve him and his children. The best thing about this Thanksgiving was knowing that the next one I will be with my family :)

This week we did better than last week. We thought we were going to have a baptism but they needed more time. So we will see how they keep progressing. We were very successful at church. We brought 5 of the people who we have on date to church. We were really happy to see them show up to church. We had 3 others go so in total we had 8 investigadors at church this week and we have 6 people on baptismal date. There are two for this week. One is named Christian, he is to complete a family and another girl named Yaoska. She went to the baptism on Saturday to see what it was going to be like. We are praying hard that they will be able to be baptized this week. They both are really positive and seem pretty sure but we will see what happens!

We are now over 2 weeks over here without water. It is so awful. No one has water it seems like. We have had to go to our neighbors house and haul water from their well to our house to shower. I dont know what is going on but we are all dry. Because there is no water, everyone has to get water out of the wells but now the wells are drying up. If we go another week without water we will be in trouble. The people need there water and they dont have enough money to keep buying oney from the store. I heard some rumors that it should come back today or tomorrow but you just never know.

We had a miracle this week. So we did service this week at a members house but right before we left to go work over there we got a call from our president and he told us to go to the church because there was someone there that wanted to talk to us. So we went and we met this guy who literally went to the church because he wants to get baptized with his wife. They live in our area and we talked to them and he told us he wants to be good with God so he wants to get married and baptized. I felt a little weird that that would happen but he seems pretty real. They went to church this week and they loved it. So that was a big miracle that we saw this week! Pretty cool stuff.

Thats what I got for you guys this week! We are just a little closer to Christmas. There are a couple houses here that have put up Christmas lights! I love it! I cant wait for Christmas! JI think this week we are going to break out the Christmas music!

I hope everyone has a great week!

Much love,

Elder Sherle