Letter #49 (July 11th, 2012)

Hey all,
I thought last week was challenging... well, Heavenly Father showed me otherwise! This past week was the most challenging week I have had in this area. Even though we have seen some great progression with the active members, the less-actives are progressing very, very slowly. The active ones are beginning to realise they have to band together or else the church is going to fall apart and they are going to have no church anymore.
We had a great time this week with having members work with us and with storms and flooding around our house and even a motorcycle accident (well, not really accident, more of it just fell over...), but I'll explain more about those incidents later.

The work has been going well. We have quite a few families we have been focusing on their Family Scripture Study and seen that it really helps them improve and focus on the gospel in their families. We were also able to get one of the members to come with us to this one really far area where we have some members with really strong faith and really strong feet. They are progressing well and are aiming for the temple this September.

The stormy weather has really affected our work this week, making it again, impossible to get to some areas while it is raining. We have really tried to follow the Spirit as we change our plans to accommodate for the weather and often pray so hard that the rains will be stayed so that we can accomplish the work of the Lord in these areas. We had an amazing experience with that just this past Monday where the rains were stayed for the whole day while we harvested the rice for one of our less-active families wit the zone. The father of the family was so surprised when he saw 18 missionaries turn up to help out his harvest. It was a great experience.

In that same area the day before was where we saw the hand of the Lord protect us from something that could have been a much worse accident. We were going up the mountain in the one part of our area that afternoon where it turns out the day before the storm had almost destroyed the road, and it was all basically rocks now. The driver we have was very careful and thankfully going slowly so that when he lost his balance on this one part of the road, the motor just fell over. Luckily Elder Padilla jumped off the bike, and my pants got a little burnt on the under parts of the motor when it fell over but other than that, there was nothing else that had happened. We were very lucky and thankful that Heavenly Father always watches out for his missionaries.

So it also flooded outside our house Sun morning and we thought we were going to have to wade though the water to get to church but it turned out that it subsided before we left the house so it was all good.
I got the package from the ZL's after the CSP we had on Mon. The CSP was great and we hired a truck form the municipal to get up the mountain, cause i was nice and thought about the sister missionaries (see how kind i am Mum) and that it would be safer than the motors on that road. Then we spent 2 and half hours harvesting the humay (rice) and collecting it up. Thankyou soo much for the package and all the things inside. How did you know I love jumping frogs!? Love you!

I love you all so much,
One year has gone so fast (almost)...
Miss you,
Love you all,
Elder Taylor Addison Cox


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Terri here: We sent Taylor a package for his birthday (18th July) and made sure it got there before his actual birthday. The company I send the packages with check everything before it's sealed up, so we couldn't wrap any thing in the box, so he asked for "consumables", which are things he could either eat or something the missionaries play with and then give away to the local kids....hence "the jumping frogs". So he's opened it already before his birthday and is enjoying the things we sent!!