Keiko 2016

Hey everyone! Hope you´re all having super great weeks. It was another great, fast week here in Viru! I´ll tell ya about it:So Perú had presidential elections this past week which was nuts! Their elections are a little different, everyone has to vote or pay a fee, so everyone votes.  You can go from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon.  There can be no church on the day of voting.  The venders go crazy cause everyone is out in the streets.  The taxis charge way too much.  And that was just in my little town of Viru! I can´t imagine how it was in Chimbote or Trujillo, let alone Lima.  A girl named Keiko won, but they just narrowed it down to the top two, then they vote again in October.  So we´ll have a round two in six months!I had an interchange with an elder named Elder Herget, which was sweet.  He´s from Connecticut and was the volleyball player of the year there last year! Look up highlights on YouTube of Todd Herget, and lobby for him to get into BYU to play volleyball haha;)  It was sweet though, we developed a good friendship and got some good work done in his area.  Also, his room has three couches! It´s so fancy! I took a laying down lazy position on a couch that I haven´t taken in five months and it felt so nice haha.There are so many bugs in Viru, it´s so annoying! Ants and flies and cockroaches and mosquitos...especially ants.  And they´re fumugating the mosquitos because there have been all these cases of denge fever and three have died! So that´s insane and annoying.Yesterday, Elder Anco and I were in a lesson with a lady who was going to be a new investigator.  It was our first lesson with her and we were teaching the restoration.  All of the sudden, her drunk husband walks in and is like, "I´m Catholic! I´m Catholic!" Honestly...I was scared out of my mind that he was going to start flipping tables and smashing bottles on our heads.  But he just got dizzy and started being weird and shaking our hands and telling us he wanted to change.  He was drunk, so it doesn´t really mean anything, but at least he didn´t kill us!  We had a good laugh about it after.

Birthday party in the chapel.

Singing primary birthday songs to Elder Hererra.

We climbed a hill this morning by our house for exercise.

This isn´t my companion.  His name is Elder Herrera, we live with him and his companion.  He and his companion are the other elders in my branch.  I just realized that you still haven´t seen Elder Anco, my companion, but I don´t have a picture of him right now!

I have been working a lot on my motivation and attitude.  Not only doing the things Heavenly Father wants me to do, but doing them for the reasons he wants them done! Because of His love for his children!  So I´ve been praying with all energy of heart for charity.  The other day, we knocked a door and attracted the attention of a family outside another house in the neighborhood.  It was obviously their house.  The dad moped over to us, obviously annoyed to have the missionaries at his door.  The other neighbors laughed, making fun and pointing that he had to deal with us.  One of them yelled, "Tell them that we´re catholic!" which got a good laugh out of the group.  We just stood there and smiled, but what pain I felt! Not for me, but for Heavenly Father.  These people don´t know what they´re missing! They don´t understand what Christ did for them, and they don´t want to understand! If we really understood as people the Atonement and our identity, I think things would be a whole lot different.  I realized in that moment the sadness that there must be in the Celestial Kingdom,  Heavenly Father is probably the saddest person in the whole universe! If he´s willing to leave 99 sheep to seek after just 1 that´s straying, He´s clearly not satisfied with a high percentage! He wants every single one of His children to have his blessings, and it must kill Him when even one of them strays!  With eternal progression and an infinite posterity, it´s evident that at least a few won´t make it.  "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way" teaches us that the number of those who won´t make it is more than just a few.  But with that deep sadness comes the capacity to feel even more happiness.  It only makes sense that to have the most possible happiness in the Celestial Kingdom, we´ll have to have the most possible sadness too.  But light always beats darkness, and happiness will always be more aparent than sadness.  Thanks for letting me tell you all the gospel thoughts of a missionary in Viru:)So that´s the week!  I keep praying for all yall and thinking about you all the time! Hope everyone is doing well, wherever you are! Nos vemos!Elder Hart