Numero 74 ~ Baptism in English

Hey fam! It was a good week here in Puerto. Like always. 

President came this week and had interviews with us. He also talked about our baptisms and how the branches were doing. Elder Walker and I have been doing a good job with both of those. 

So I sit down for my interview and the first thing he says to me was "Elder Sherle, it looks like your time in Puerto is coming to an end". I told him how much I didnt want to go. He explained to me that I have to go to Managua to renew my ID at immigration and he told me that he doesnt know if i am coming back or no. He gave me 30 seconds to tell him why I should stay here in Puerto. So i threw some good stuff at him. We will see what happens. You never know if he is just playing with your head or if he is for sure haha. It was a great interview though. I always love having time with President. He always give me good advice. 

We also watched a transmition for all the missions in the world. Elder Bednar, Elder Oaks, and Elder Anderson. They talked about the important things about teaching and finding and how we need to preach repentance to the people and baptize converts. It was a good transmition. I took some good notes. 

With our investigadors right now, we have 10. They are a solid ten. We have some really quality invesigadors, just not much of a quantity. I know quality is better than quanity but we want to increase the quantity of quality investigadors so that we can keep baptizing and helping people. We have some sweet guys that are preparing to be baptized in February. That Priesthood baby!

Attendance went up again. We had 96 this week. We were really happy. Even with that 96 there were some families that didnt show up so we are going to keep growing week by week. 

We also had the blessing to baptize this week. We baptized a guy named Kelvin! He is so awesome! All english baby! We did the whole service in english, english himns, prayers, everything! It was great.

I baptized him and of course right in the prayer i messed up the words! hahaha i have never messed up in spanish and in my own language I messed up. I corrected it good right after I messed up but come on. haha. Definitely one of my favorite baptisms just because I had never done a baptism in english before so i got to participate in that. 

Well thats what I got for you guys this week! Ill send some pics i got this week! Wish me luck that I stay in Puerto!

Love you all!

Elder Sherle

Numero 73 ~ Holding hands around the world

Hey fam. Its a little rainy over here in Puerto these last couple days but it has been a another good week. 

Well first off we went up again in attendance in the branch. We had 92 which was good for us. There is still a lot of growing but we are going little by little. My goal is that we can get up to 120 by the time I leave. There are changes in 2 weeks though. I dont think I am going to leave but you never know. 

Kelvin went to church too. He has his baptismal date for this Saturday. He seems pretty much ready to go. It is going to be so cool because we are going to do the ordinance in english. I have never baptized anyone in english so this might be the first time! I am pumped for it! He is so cool. 

In church we set apart my convert, Efrain, as the new young mens president of the branch. He is doing great in the church. He always tells us how he is going to leave on his mission this December. 

We are doing this thing now where every saturday we are leaving with 2 men in our branch and we do divisions. It really helps us because our area is huge and we dont have time to do everything in one day. I think it really helps us raise the attendance because we can pass by a ton of members and remind them to go and help them out so they are ready to go to church. I sometimes feel like we have to hold the hands of so many members but it is working haha. 

The Area Presidency puts a lot of focus on the self sufficiency so that the missionaries have less responsibility and the members can do more. A lot of people are just so young in the church so they still dont really understand how the church works yet but with time it will get better.

The new area plan came out for 2016. I felt a little weird because i remember when the plan of 2015 came out. It is a similiar plan and its perfect to help strengthen the church for us. It focuses a lot on the daily prayer and scripture study, paying tithing, keeping the day of rest, doing temple work, and simple things like that so that the members become more converted and receive more blessings in their life.

Our investigadors are doing good too. We are a little low right now just because some have moved out of our area but we are doing decent. Only 10 right now but 6 of them are on date. We just need to get more this week to make our pool of investigadors bigger so that we keep baptizing and helping the church get more members. 

Well January is already flying by. I cant believe it. Time is rolling right now. We are just pushing along here working hard and finding those chosen people! 

Until next week

much love

Elder Sherle

Numero 72 ~ Playing the Piano and gettin' robbed

Hey fam! It was another good week here in Puerto! We saw some great miracles this week!

I guess I will start with the most recent miracle. Yesterday we were at church and we had already started the meeting and we were about to start the sacrament and then guess who walks in?! Mario. Yes, Mario. Mario came to church. We baptized him in November and he hadnt been able to come to church since then. He walked in and he was able to get confirmed. I was so suprised to see him go. We had called him earlier and reminded him but I never thought he was going to go. I couldnt believe it for a second haha I was pretty suprised. Pretty sweet miracle. 

We taught over 50 lessons to specifically recent converts and less actives this week. We went to town because we need our branch to get the attendance up. The good thing was that the attendance did go up. We had like 85 in the morning and about 50 in the afternoon. So in total about 130 people. Thats better that we have had in a long time. We found so many less actives this week. We printed out the simi of every member in the branch that is registered. There are a lot and i mean a lot. Its hard because there are a lot that just dont want anything with our church for some little thing that happened and they didnt receive us but we did find some positive ones that came to church so we will keep helping those ones and keep working to find more this week. 

We put a couple baptismal dates this week. One of them came to church too which was good. It was kind of hard to get him to go but he went. I think he liked it. He went to the Miskito meeting so I didnt really understand much but it sounded good haha. I am always on the piano during the meetings too haha.

We had a couple other investigadors go too. Kelvin went, the one that only speaks english. He is sweet. I wish you could hear him talk. Also, my recent convert Efrain spoke in church. He did a great job. We gave him a white shirt too so he was looking with a shirt and tie. 

We worked pretty hard this week. Litlle by little we are going. We dont have anyone to baptize this week but next week we got a couple possibilities. This week is really important to start finding for next month. 

Oh last thing haha this week i almost got robbed my first time in my mission. So i was texting someone in the road and some dude walks up right close to me and tries to grab the phone out of my hand but i had a good grip on it so he didnt get it so he faces me up and he pulls out a machete and puts it up to my face and his buddy pulls out a knife and they keep asking me for the phone but i kept telling them that it was broken and it didnt work and once they figured out that we didnt look scared they just put it away and walked away. It got my heart beating pretty good but nothing happened haha. I just got to be a little more careful in the street.

Well thats what I got for you guys this week. I hope you are all doing well! I miss you guys and love you guys so much!

Elder Sherle

We didn't get any info on this... looks like P-day
last week was at the beach with stingrays
and monkeys.

Numero 71 ~ Christmas Party with the zone

Hey fam. It was an awesome week here in Puerto Cabezas.

Tuesday we had the Christmas party with our zone. We took some cool pictures together as a zone with cool glasses and christmas stuff and then we had a nice lunch with everyone. The food was so good. It filled me up so much i felt like i was going to throw up haha. I dont have the stomach i used to back in the states. Then we started the activity with a movie called Big Hero 6. It was a good movie. Even though it was a kids movie i enjoyed it. I miss movies so much. After the movie we had a talent show. It was alright. Everyone had to be in a talent of some sort. I didnt want to put a ton of time into a dance or anything so i just did some ball handling stuff.

 I also did a song with Elder Monson and Elder Gonzales. We had a good time. I enjoyed the activity a lot. At the end we did a cool musical number and we shared testimonies and remembered why we are here as missionaries. We got some awesome gifts too. They gave every companionsip microwaves and a box of popcorn!!! I am so pumped about the microwave, it just makes everything so easy. I havent used a microwave since I was in my first area back in El Rosario. They also gave us a basket of fruit which is super hard to get! They bought us some really nice apples and grapes. Ya real fruit. That isnt found here in Puerto and its pretty expensive over there in Managua. It was a good treat. President Collado and Hermana Collado hooked it up!

Wednesday we got back to work. We had some decent days. We found a couple cool people and put some fechas with some others. It felt a little weird because we didnt get really started to work until Wednesday so I felt a little out of the normal routine. It was good though. One thing that kind of stunk was we had a really cool family that we were teaching. They were reading and praying and doing everything that you want your investigadors to do and we went on saturday to see how they were and they told us that they were moving. They told us that they had to move to Sebaco the next day. So we lost that family this week which was a bummer.

Our New Years was good. We worked all day and everything and then we had dinner with the family that makes us lunch. She made us some nice pork and we had some cake. We went in at the normal time at 8:30. My comp said that all the fireworks woke him up but they didnt wake me up. Im a heavy sleeper. I cant believe we are already in 2016. I feel like 2015 went by really fast. I remember about a year ago i got with Elder Lainez. Time is flying.

On friday we had a baptism too. We baptised a part of a cool family in our ward. One baptism was for the ward because she was 8 and the other was for the mission because she was 10. The dad was going to baptize they but they both wanted Elder Walker to baptize them so he did it hahaha. It was a cool baptism.

Yesterday the attendance was a little down again. Its always disappointing. Our president left for efy so I directed at church. It was cool haah i was like the President of the branch. We had 4 investigadors go to church and one guy showed up who has been visiting the church for the last couple weeks and we just thought he was a member but turns out he isnt and he just got here to puerto a couple months ago. Something crazy is that he barely speaks spanish and he doesnt speak miskito, he only speaks criol english, which is like Jamaican english but worse, so we are going to teach him in english! so dope!! haha we will see how that goes. we are going to visit him tomorrow.

well thats all i got for you guys. i got some cool pics for this week! I love you all and hope you all have a great week!!!

Elder Sherle