November 5, 2012

Hello Family! Well, I know you're all dying to know how things went at the doctor: as of right now, I have no idea what has happened! Haha. All I can tell you is I didn't pass an abdominal-rub test, then I was sent to a hospital-like location. But I don't know the results yet: we were supposed to get my x-ray results today, but my sonogram work won't be ready until Wednesday. So, I go to the doctor last Monday: Elder Astle and I had NO idea where it was . We found it eventually, but it was tough. Then I met with the doctor, he tested me on some things, wrote up some papers, and told me I should go to the hospital to get an x-ray and all that. Well, I was thinking and hoping that I would be able to do that the next day but I couldn't, because President Alvarado didn't want me to. He made me wait until Friday of last week to go to the hospital. President told me to just work hard and not to drive the car as much as I should bike, even though Sister Visker (our nurse) and the doctor both told me to not bike with my injury. He didn’t want me to go until Friday because that was the day of our zone conference: he would rather have me work through the pain for the week and miss two hours of zone conference. I'm sorry, I'm really not in a good mood right now. I LOVE my investigators, I LOVE Puerto Rico. But I'm really struggling with this whole injury thing. Elder Garcia and President want me to work a lot more than I feel capable of, and a lot more than Sister Visker and the doctor have told me. But in not working according to Elder Garcia's and President's standards, I then gain the reputation of a lazy elder...frustrating! Alright, enough of the negative. Let me say here real quick thank you to everyone that sent me a letter or card for Halloween: the Tanners, Lunds, Grandma and Grandpa, and Olivia Buttars! You all made my week that much better. The rest of my week was very uneventful, as you can imagine: we actually spent a lot of time in meetings last week: Last Wednesday night we had a meeting at the mission office. As you can imagine, we were trying to avoid the fanfare of what every missionary loves to call "The most dangerous night for a missionary". And then Thursday morning we had a meeting with the first counselor in the General Young Men's presidency: Larry Gibson. It was pretty good! He gave us some good ideas for working with our wards, which is the main focus right now here in Puerto Rico. We're about to implement some great ideas in our ward which I think will rapidly increase the excitement over missionary work in Arecibo. We didn't have a baptismal service last Saturday: I'm sorry that I failed to tell you that none of our investigators attended Church the week before, so they couldn't be baptized. The mission rule is investigators have to attend 3 straight Sunday services before they can be baptized. So, we're back--essentially--to square one and are waiting for the end of the month, hoping our investigators will be faithful and come to church! Haha I really love all of them. We started teaching a great kid this past week. He's 17 and preparing for college here: he's very religious, but his family is essentially uncaring towards religion, though they believe in "good-and-bad" things. We passed him last Tuesday and talked with him and invited him to read a pamphlet about the Restoration, then we met with him Saturday and asked him how it went. He then proceeded to tell us that he prayed about the truth of our message and received a feeling that he could not describe, and that he knew what we are teaching him is true. Elder Garcia and I were so excited! We gave him a Book of Mormon and he is excitedly reading. The couple we are teaching are both...at a stand still haha He is not progressing more with his smoking addiction, and because of his work he can't get to church. He's way busy making his lights right now: we actually helped him make a few last Saturday, hoping that would help him have the time to attend church, but he still told us he doesn't think he'll be able to attend church until December. I think his decisions are impacting his wife: they both know our message is true, but their lack of church attendance keeps them from the font: and she would attend church but he isn't. Hmmm...what can we do? Haha we're praying really hard for them. Well, that's really all about it! Tonight I'm headed up to spend the night with the district leader. Hooray for sleepovers! We'll see how this week goes...I'm confident things are going to be fine! Love Elder Cevering