Bruce's email and pictures February 2, 2015

 Here it is dangerous but we were with a member :)  It was scary to take pictures, so I didn't 

take many, but I had to take some before we left so I took a couple!

 Cleaning the church on Saturday!

Dear friends and family,

I can´t stop smiling. How is everyone doing?  I hope you are all doing amazing.  We never have a reason to not be happy because of how good our Father in Heaven has been with us.  Just start to think about it, and you will be there for hours thinking about His love and mercy.  It's a great thing :)

This week passed by like a dream.  It seems like the whole mission is turning into a dream.  Time is passing too quickly.  So much happens yet so much still needs to happen.  First of all, we have some great investigators.  Ixxxxx is an older woman that we met from Venezuela.  We have so many people from different parts of the world in our area because we are in the heart of the city. We have so many people from Venezuela.  Many are moving here because the opportunities are greater here than what is offered in that country.  They are good people.  We also have an investigator named Pxxxx.  She is a girlfriend of a recent convert.  It is always really wise to work through recent converts because all of their friends and family aren´t members in most cases. They both arrived at church yesterday and with members too.  We didn't have to do anything besides coordinate with the members on how the investigators would get to church.

I had to translate for our Filipina converts again and that was quite the experience.  I had to do it in a testimony meeting.  They speak really fast when they bear their testimonies.  And I used to think that they just spoke too fast for me to be able to understand.  That's not the problem anymore, it's converting it into words and doing it in the way that they are saying it.  Every once in a while I will be stuck on a word and then I will be behind a couple of sentences.  But after a while you get in the groove and it feels like someone is just putting in something and right out comes another in a different language.  It is cool to experience :)  I love it.  

A man came that I never thought to see there.  He is the husband of a less active, and the less active is a sister of an active returned missionary sister.  We ate in their house a long time ago and saw them yesterday.  He doesn´t believe in God.  Those cases are very difficult.  I remember on the bus ride home from San Blas, I talked with the man next to me from Italy and he was an atheist also.  It is so hard to know where to start from with people who have that train of thinking.  It is just so hard for me because if there is no God, then there is no happiness nor hope.  Yet it is nice to invite them to act and to come and find out for themselves.  We have plans to teach some lessons today, to Ixxxxx and others, yet this week is changes and we will be busy and having no sleep from today until Thursday, so we won't be able to teach any of them until this weekend.  The Lord is truly providing people for us to teach.  We are finding families as well :)

The mission is losing 36 missionaries and 33 new ones are coming.  We received 26 last change, so that means that close to half of the mission will be training this change.  It is a great time of training and helping missionaries to progress.  We are preparing for Elder Duncan to come and I am really excited :)  The mission seems like a totally different mission to me now.  It has changed so much in this small span of time.  Missionaries are more obedient and we are having more success.  It's fantastic.  It's enough to just keep me smiling all of the time, even though I just always feel like doing it anyway.  I love being with missionaries.  It is weird, but I feel like I love them now.  You just want the best for them.  It's like us with our investigators.  We just want them to be happy and to obey the commandments because we know with a certainty that we can only be happy on the condition of obedience.  It's the only way.  Wickedness never was happiness.  It is hard sometimes because we may not see exactly why for every single rule, yet we are promised a blessing.  Isn't it worth it if we have a promise of a blessing to obey the commandment?  I think so :)

I hope that this helps a lot.  I hope I have said many details.  I am opening my mouth all of the time and we are meeting wonderful people. 

It was really interesting... a couple of days ago we were on our way to a dinner and we asked a guy for directions.  He might have been in his 20s.  We then started walking with him and I started to talk to him.  It was amazing to see the change in his countenance.  When we started he wasn't interested, yet as I told him about Jesus Christ, the gospel, salvation, and heaven, he became totally focused and when I asked him for his number and if he would come to church, he was excited and I saw the change in his eyes.  I can't do that experience credit over email, but I can testify that the gospel of Jesus Christ can change people's lives.  It can take the worst person in the world and change them into the best.  Only through Christ and His infinite atonement is this possible.  

I love you all.  I know that this work is true and it's the most important work on earth.  Take care this week and share the gospel with those of our brothers and sisters around you :)

Love, Elder Bitter