A Day Late and a Peso Short!

Dear Everyone!

 

What my companion Elder Sevilla had forgotten to tell me was that since changes are this week, our P-Day is switched to Tuesdays.  Although it doesn't make sense in my had, no matter how many times he has explained to me the reasoning for this (it could be the Spanish), this will happen every six weeks.  But because the schedule has changed for all MTC missionaries, this past change was only five weeks long instead of six.  Only this one, though.  All of the new guys came in today and tomorrow, we're going to Montevideo so Elder Sevilla can go to his leadership meeting and I can meet more of these missionaries!!  It's gonna be excellent!  AHH, but after this change, Elder Sevilla is going home!!  I don't even wnt to talk about it.  I love him so much.  He is my father.

 

This week was so incredible!  I must admit that I have not yet "lost myself" in the work, as it were.  But I am getting there.  I love every day and I come home exhausted and fulfilled.  We work so hard.  We walk so much.  We are getting rained on a lot.  But the work is moving forward!  We met with the Wilson family again this week, after three weeks of not seeing them.  (Appointments always fall through; it's imporant not to get discouraged by this, though, but not always easy.)  They both accepted baptism!  But they're not married.  We're going to have to uncover that stone as they progress, which I am really hoping that they will.  We also have been meeting with a man named Honorio Soriano.  He is super nice and used to be a Bible teacher.  After several meetings with him, he told us that he has had a testimony of the Book of Mormon for a long time because he had met with missionaries several years before.  What!?  That was a shocker for me.  But he is also--wait for it--not married to the woman he lives with!  We really have our work cut out for us.  Our most promising investigators are the ones who aren't married to the people they are living with.  The woman he lives with is named Ana and although she says she believes in God, because she lost her five-year-old child last year, it is obivious that she has lost a lot of hope.  We taught her the Plan of Salvation and got almost no reaction out of her.  We're gonna try our best!  We are teaching plenty of other people, but the adversary is really working hard in San Carlos.  We do this thing where we have amazing first-lessons and then we return and the people don't want anything.  It's super difficult.  But the Lord keeps leading us to people that need us.  Whether or not they choose to follow His commandments is not my choice.  I am simply a vessel for the Spirit and an inviter.

 

These weeks pass by so quickly and I can't believe that I have already been out for one change.  And, woah, I am a missionary.  Like, for realsies.  I truly love this work.  It is so important.  I hope that everyone is looking for opportunities to INVITE their friends to do things like come to church, church activities, or meeting with the missionaries. I don't want to hear any of this "I'm sharing the Gospel by being a good example" and nothing else.  That's a cop-out to missionary work.  Alas, I must leave.  I love you all and thank you for your prayers on my behalf.  I actually sent pictures today.  One of which was right after we were severely rained upon and we were standing outside.  I must now go and serve the beloved children of God.

 

LOVE,

Elder Plautz

Just coming home after walking 3 miles in the pouring rain!

Great Companions!

Planning time...but who took the photo?

A Week full of Miracles!

Dear everyone,

This week was truly one of the most magnificent of my life.  I witnessed so many miracles!!  One of which, I will delve into:  We clapped a house and a lady came out an immediately began to yell at us.  We asked her if she believed in God and she told us that there was no way she could.  She was so angry!  Normally, for those who mock us or yell at us, Elder Sevilla and I just say goodbye.  But we stayed and just began to testify of the Plan of Salvation.  It was crazy that the idea had just popped into both of our heads, but we did it nonetheless.  She wouldn't have any of it.  All we could do was leave her with a pamplet of the Plan of Salvation, which she ripped out of my hand in a fit of rage, and we went on our way.  

That night we contacted a family on the street who seem really interested in hearing our message, so we wrote down their address and made an appointment for later.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but we get a lot of non-existant addresses.  This address existed, but it wasn't their house.  As we arrived to the house four days later, we realized that it was the house of the lady who had yelled at us for five minutes straight.  So we clapped it again.  She saw us through the doorway and said "just a second!"  She got ready, came outside, pamphlet in hand and everything about her countenance was completely different.  She smiled and sat down with us as she explained why she was so upset.  It was because on top of many other misfortunes, she had lost a child.  But upon reading the pamphlet, something felt different.  She told us that she had been to many churches in her life, but had never found one in which she felt comfortable.  She was now willing to listen and wow, it was such a good lesson.  Her name is Cristina.  We have began teaching her and I have really high hopes.  This was just one of the several miracles I witnessed this past week.  I can't express how different my relationship is with the Spirit of God now that I am set apart as a missionary.  What a blessing this is to be out here.  I love it so much.

After our lesson with Cristina, it began to rain.  Not like one of those, hey-it's-raining rains.  One of those HOLY-COW-WE-HAVE-TO-SWIM-HOME rains.  Elder Sevilla and I were laughing all the way home as the rain came from any and all directions.  We were soaked from head to toe.  Goodness gracious, that was quite a trip.  It was about six kilometers back home.  (Yeah, they use that system out here...)  I don't know how much that is in miles, but it felt like a lot, nonetheless!

I gave my first talk in church yesterday!  But I had time to prepare it, so it wasn't one of those talks.  Those impromptu talks.  It was on missionary work and an invitation to the members to participate more in member-missionary work.  I felt like it was a really good talk and I realized that I still love to speak in front of large crowds, even if it's in Spanish!  I LOVE BEING A MISSIONARY!  I must now go and serve the beloved children of God!

LOVE,
Elder Plautz

Trying to find the few who are chosen out of the many who are called.

Dear everyone,

First of all, every computer lab, it seemed, in San Carlos was closed today.  The one we normally went to: closed.  Our backup: closed.  Our backup backup: closed!  WHAT IS THIS!?  Really, the only reason I am able to write today is because we got together as a zone to practice Singing for a Stake-wide activity later this month.  So here I email from Maldonando, Uruguay, and for some reason, this keyboard is tripping me up.  They aren't too different, but they're different enough to frustrate me when I have so little time to email and not enough fingers or brainpower to accomplish this task!  Alas, I will try!

It was a really up and down week. The middle of it was really low for Elder Sevilla and me when in a matter of two days, every single one of our investigators with baptismal dates decided to stop listening.  All of them.  It was so difficult.  By the end of that second day, I just didn't know what to do.  I could feel nothing but sadness.  Not because of me or my companion, but because I realized that we meet so many people with so much potential, but they ultimately have the choice in the matter.  And sometimes (in this case, every time) the choice they make is to turn their back on the truth.  I don't feel harsh saying that because this is the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.  This is the Lord's church and I am here to do His work.  And when people decide that they don't want to continue, it hurts.  But the next day, after I woke up and still didn't feel any better about having lost all of the people we were teaching, we went to a district meeting and I learned just how amazing of a teacher and leader Elder Sevilla is.  He taught a simple lesson on faith that totally changed who I am as a missionary.  I doubled my efforts and my faith and we got back in the game and lo and behold, we found a ton of new people to teach.  Please pray for success.  Elder Sevilla and I don't waste a second.  That is to say, we don't waste a second unless my companion is incapacitated!  Yeah, on Saturday, he lost his ability to walk because of so rather unexsplainable, yet excruciating pain in an area that we won't discuss any futher.  It sufficeth me to say that he was in a great deal of pain and we could work almost all of Saturday and Sunday.  But I think he's fine now.

Elder Sevilla and I have been brainstorming about how we can get the members to be interactive with the missionary work and came up with an activity where we're going to --wait for it-- SING!  Let me say something that I have just learned from experience:  trying to find a Latinos that can sing is like Simon Cowell tyring to find ANYBODY to sing.  It just really doesn't happen that much.  But out of some tender mercy from the Lord, not only does my companion sing, but he sings well!  So we have made an arrangement to a hymn and voila!  We're going to sing it to members family by family and while we're singing, the Spirit is going to prompt them with names of people that we can visit.  I'm super excited to implement this.

I apologize about how short my letter is today, but we're on a time crunch because of the unfortunate events that happened this morning.  I pray that it doesn't happen again next week.  The reason it might is because Uruguay in February is immersed in Carnvials and parties in the nighttime street.  Every day, ther is a bongo drumline that marches down the street and it is LOUD.  And there are people dancing everywhere and sometimes it can be difficult to fall asleep.  But since I am a missionary, sleeping isn't that hard because we're always working.  I love you all and keep you in my prayers.  Remember that God is real and that He is our Heavenly Father.  Too many people out here aren't familiar with the name "Jesus Christ."  Don't take that for granted.  I must now go and serve the beloved children of God.

LOVE,

Elder Plautz

Amazing and Difficult Week!

Dear everybody,

What a week of hard work!  Elder Sevilla and I don't waste a minute and you better believe it.  The summer is so hot here and the only time I can remember having sweat this much was while I was working as a pest control technician in the blisteringly hot summer of North Carolina!  But it was worth it, because we have started teaching a TON of people.  Make no mistake: I spend at least seven hours every day teaching or tracting (proselyting).  Elder Sevilla has taught me so much and my Spanish is always improving.

We started teaching a family by the name of the Wilsons (sounds real Latino, right?).  They just invited us in without hesitation and invited us back to teach them.   When we returned, they had so many questions for us!  "there are so many churches.  Which one is correct?  How can we find out?"  Seriously, those are such answerable questions!  We find so many people out here with a ton of potential.  Most of them, after our first visit, don't really wan't us to return.  The adversary is working hard on the other side to prevent this work from moving forward.  But I have faith that our work is always progressing the faith of the inhabitants of San Carlos, Maldonado.

Yesterday was Fast and Testimony meeting and it was super powerful.  I didn't know this before my mission, but Sundays are a waiting game for missionaries.  We wait to see if those whom we invited will show up.  It can be kind of antsy, and even though not everyone showed up, a less-active family that we have been teaching (the Herreras) showed!  We started teaching them this week, too.  They're progressing so well!  And a little old lady, named Hermana Violeta, about eighty-five years old, who has a million problems with her back and spine and legs, walked about three-quarters of a mile, up hill, to make it to all three meetings of church because she hadn't been in a while.  She was so dedicated!  

During fast and testimony meeting, a man who was about ninety years old rolled his wheelchair all the way up to the pulpit, pulled himself up to the microphone and, while leaning on the stand and both of his non-functional legs, through a mumbling mouth bore one of the most powerful testimonies of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that I have ever heard.  What a privilege it was to witness.

If you haven't been able to tell, most of my ward is a bunch of old people.  But they're amazing.  The members of this ward are extraordinary.  We're just trying to get them involved in the missionary work more.  And you may not know this, but there are a lot of pet roosters in Uruguay.  When I was growing up, the only thing I really knew about roosters was that they don't lay eggs and that they cock one time in the morning.  It's not just one time.  And it's not just in the morning.  It's, like, every twenty seconds.  And it's all day until evening.  Now every time we go to the store, Elder Sevilla asks me what I need to buy and I reply with my list, and it always ends in "¡alguna cosa para matar esas gallinas!"  (Something to kill those roosters.)  

This week was amazing and totally hard.  It alwasy gets harder, but I also keep learning how to rely on the Savior more for support.  These weeks just blaze by.  I'm trying to enjoy every second!  I love you and and thank you for your prayers!  But in all seriousness, you should write me more letters!  Because missionaries LOVE MAIL!  I must now go and serve the beloved children of God.

LOVE,
Elder Plautz