Elder Dylan Thomas' Missionary Experiences in Guatemala, Retalhuleu 2015-2017: Charity Makes me Feel Good

Hi family and friends!

This week has been really great, and full of miracles! I don´t even know where to start. I´ve seen a lot of awesome things happen this week, and I´ve felt the Spirit a ton. So I guess I´ll try to remember everything that´s happened!

First off, we found an awesome little family of investigators! A less-active sister gave us a reference of a family she knows that is going through hard times. On Wednesdaywe went to contact them, and my companion said he felt like we should bring them some sort of gift. We bought them a loaf of bread, and when we knocked on the door a woman in her early thirties answered the door. When she saw us standing there with the loaf of bread, she just burst into tears!

It turns out that this poor lady is going through some REALLY hard times. Her name is Maricela, and in the past six months, both her mother and her husband have died, and she´s stuck taking care of three little boys and her disabled sister. She´s had a really hard time making ends meet, and it just so happened that the night we brought her this loaf of bread she had nothing to give her children or sister for dinner. With that loaf of bread, they were all able to eat something, even if it was just a little bit. We shared with her the doctrine of the Plan of Salvation and gave her a priesthood blessing for comfort. She was very touched by the doctrine, and I can tell she´s going to be a very solid investigator!

Later in the week, we called and asked permission from our district president if we could tap into the bishop´s storehouse to help this family. He said we could, so we brought them a GIANT bag full of food to help them get through these hard times until Maricela can find a steady job (it´s cool when you´re the branch presidency, you can do stuff like that). It felt so good to help them, and I´m so excited to see them progress more in the gospel!

So that was awesome! We also found out that a week from Wednesday my companion is going to have transfers, and then he´ll be released as branch president and I´ll be set apart. Yesterday our district president and the first counselor of the mission presidency came to visit our branch, and it turns out there´s A LOT of work to be done. The branch is just extremely disorganized right now, so we´re going to be spending the next month or so getting everything more organized. There are just a lot of people with callings that don´t know what their callings are, a lot of men that need to be advanced in the priesthood, stuff like that. As of right now, we´ve only been doing sacrament meeting and Sunday School on Sundays because no one knows where they´re supposed to go for the third hour or what their callings are or anything! Sooo we´re going to fix that. So these next few weeks will be very busy! A week fromSaturday we have our branch trip to the temple, where two couples will be sealed and several members will be receiving their endowments. After that, I´ll probably be spending a lot of time assigning as many callings as possible and getting the branch more organized.

Sooo there´s that! This calling is going to be tough, but I´m already starting to love it here and I can tell I´m going to learn A TON.

Have a great week y´all! Love you all!

-Elder Thomas :)

Here's a portion of Elder Thomas' email to us:

The other day we were with Maricela, the new investigator that we found. She was telling me how her little 10-year-old son always says he wants to be a soldier in the U.S. Army. She then asked me randomly to sing the national anthem for them. Even though I was a little embarrassed, I sang it anyway. She started bawling halfway through the song, and she said she was crying because she would love so much to enjoy of the freedom we have and experience, and she´s going to do everything she can to help her son get there like he dreams to. She made me cry so hard! So just don´t take for granted what you guys have over there in the States...if you ever feel sad, just know that there´s a whole country full of people over here who would love to be where you are. :)