God hears our prayers

Hiking up Cerro Manquehue (Seth hates to wear jeans, so this is his cold weather attire!)

So this week was good! Plenty of excitement, especially today! We hiked up Cerro Manquehue, which took all day and was SUPER SUPER fun and we had an AMAZING view of all of Santiago. I also realized that I am very much out of shape. Still it was super awesome and the pictures really don't capture the full beauty.

A cool experience this week- So one of our investigators (named Andony Joseph) has really become our second most active young man in the ward-he just hasn't been baptized. He believes the Book of Mormon to be the word of God and Joseph Smith to be a prophet and really hasn't had a problem with anything. The only thing: baptism. He was baptized in the Catholic church and his worry is that it would be bad to be baptized twice. So last Sunday I fasting specifically that he'd be able to overcome this fear and that he'd understand that really it's ok, and even really important. The first lesson that we had with him following this fast went really poorly. He seemed to have issues that were never an issue before and baptism seemed more unlikely than ever. I kind of thought to myself, "why is this happening? Didn't I just fast for him?" 

Upon meditating Jacob 2 and Jacob 7, I realized an important lesson. In Jacob 2, Jacob describes the state of his people (wicked) and he lectures them on what they were doing. In Jacob 7, Jacob is crying out and praying to the Lord, but what was the answer to his prayer? Sherem.  This guy was seemingly the exact opposite of an answer to Jacob's prayers. Sherem "labored diligently that he might lead away the hearts of the people, insomuch that he did lead away many hearts." As it turns out, Sherem was exactly the answer to Jacob's pleadings. After Sherem's change, he began to preach truth to the people to the point that the people began to be peaceful and loving, and began to search their scriptures.

Back to our investigator Andony. 4 days later, everything changed for him and he accepted and is excited about a baptismal date. His parents are against the idea of this "second baptism" so there's still work to do, but I know God has heard our prayers and our fasting.

Have an awesome week!!!

Elder Birrell