Hard at Work (Mar. 27, 2023)

Hey everyone!! Sorry I didn't write last week, we went to the beach and I really had no time at all to write, so I'll do my best to try and fill you all in on the last 2 weeks here in Chepica. 

So to update on the branch that we're trying to open here, we have received permission from the area presidency to go ahead and start a group here, so after General conference we're going to start having meetings here. There have been a lot of complications and stress to get to this point, and currently there is still so much to do. We have a house of a member to use right now, but we're going all over town trying to find a place to rent and we're just really hoping we can find something that will work for us. So pretty much we've been given directions to start having church here, but we don't have a church, and the church has their confidence in a couple of 19 year olds from a different country to get it done. So this has been pretty stressful, but we're just going to keep moving forward one day at a time because that's all you can do really.

We're teaching some really great people here, we have a lot of people with baptism dates and progressing. We always work so hard with them and have a ton of people committed to come to church and it's always a challenge to get people to church even when there is a church in the town you live in, our problem has been that the church is in Santa Cruz which is a good 30 minute drive from Chepica, so it's been a huge challenge to get people to attend church, especially when hardly anyone has a car or money to pay for travels. We really hope that having meetings here will help out the attendance I can imagine it will. 

I've really been learning a lot lately about what a conversion is, where we must be converted, and how we must be converted. I've learned that our conversion has little to do with physical knowledge and a lot more to do with our spiritual knowledge. I could give you evidence that Jesus came and lived on the Earth from great stories in the New Testament, or I can tell you that I know Christ the Redeemer came to the world to save us because of manifestations of the spirit which I have felt. Our conversion is something spiritual, we must have a spiritually based testimony to remain solid in the gospel. We also must know to what we must be converted, and we must be converted to Jesus Christ, this is his church, he teaches us, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, that this is my ^adoctrine, and whoso ^bbuildeth upon this buildeth upon my rock, and the ^cgates of hell shall not prevail against them. And whoso shall ^adeclare more or less than this, and establish it for my doctrine, the same cometh of evil, and is not built upon my rock; but he buildeth upon a ^bsandy foundation, and the gates of hell stand open to receive such when the floods come and the winds beat upon them." (3 Nephi 11:39-40). If we are converted unto Christ and his simple yet perfect and powerful doctrine, the devil will have no power against us. He does also warn us that we must not be converted to something else, or the devil will come and we will fall, the savior must be our foundation, we must be converted unto him. In order to be converted unto him, we must follow his teachings daily, pray unto the father for help, and we must have the faith sufficient that we can obtain the mercy which the savior offers us, and with an eternal vision, understand what is truly important, and follow the savior wherever he asks us to go. We can all think of the story in John 21 when Jesus asked Peter 3 times, "Lovest thou me more then these?" and we can think about our personal conversions and if we truly love Jesus more than anything and we are willing to follow him.

I hope my message could make sense to some of you, I have just been able to learn here that if we are not converted unto Jesus Christ we cannot be saved, it is to important and critical that we do all we can to be converted to Christ and not allow anything from the world to be more important that him. I love how much I have been able to learn and I am excited to continue my life as a disciple of Jesus Christ. This is all I really have for now, and if you want to know some more about whats going on here don't hesitate to send me an email and I'm more than happy to talk to everyone. 

Elder Micheli