Letter from July 2

This week has been a wonderful week here in Cerro.  We have been blessed so much this week in finding new investigators and getting them to church.  These past 3 weeks we have found 35 new investigators, which is good, but it seemed like none of them were progressing.  This week everything started to come together and we now have 2 families that we are teaching and a few individuals as well. It was a testimony builder for me to know that if we continue to work through the challenges and especially when we aren´t seeing success, the Lord will always come through in the end.  Our goal is to set most of them with a baptismal date for this month.  One of the families that we found was truly a miracle.  Our Sunday schedule has changed and we now attend church at 2 in the afternoon. Yesterday when we got done studying, we went to an appointment that we had.  Well, the appointment fell through, so we began to knock some doors.  We knocked on a door and an 18 year old came out.  We began to talk with him and he invited us in.  After teaching him a little bit, his little brother came down and began to listen to us as well.  When we were finishing the lesson the parents got home.  We talked to them for just a minute.  As we left we invited Jon, the 18 year and his brother to church. When we returned to pick them up at about 1:50, the mom came out and had that look on her face that said, ¨you’re not taking my kids to church.¨ We talked with her for a minute and then invited her to join us as well. To my surprise she agreed, but said that she would come late because her family was eating lunch.  With Elder Norris we went to the Chapel with the hope that they would arrive.  The good news is that they did!  It was awesome to see, especially because we had first met them a few hours earlier.  Dina, the mother, said in one of the classes that she has been praying to know the path that she should follow, then she continued by saying that she believed that being in church yesterday was an answer to her prayers.  We also had 3 other investigators in church, it’s the most we have had in my time here in Cerro.  We can say that with the help of the Lord we are making progress!

Things are going great with Elder Norris as well!  It looks like we are going to be staying together another change, which will be his last change.  On Saturday we also taught a little bit of English to some people that want to be English teachers.  Most of them speak very well.  I do have to tell you a pretty funny story though. They would come up to the front with a word, then they would have to put a sentence together in English using the word in past tense.  Well one of the guys used the word cost.  Well in past tense he used the same word, cost.  When he finished I went to correct him, because that was our job, and told him that cost in past tense was costed.  Then I realized that I was wrong.  I felt like an idiot, ha I never did too well in English class.

This coming Sunday I will be traveling to La Oroya to baptized Sebastian, then afterwards we will be heading to Lima for the monthly council with President.  I will let you know how it goes. Talk to you soon.

Elder Riggs