Hey Family

Hey Everyone,

I started laughing pretty hard when mom told me about the gopher problem in the yard and dad using a metal detector to find them. In fact my companion and I used the story in a lesson with a family in our ward. There is an article in the March Liahona that talks about monkey traps that they use in Brazil. It's called "Don't get caught in a Cambuca" or something like that. We said that we had to be careful of the traps that satans sets for us to get caught in. Ways that we can avoid these traps is listening to the spirit, praying daily etc. Then we compared them to the gophers and told them that they had to be more like the intelligent gophers that know how to the avoid the traps and less like the monkeys in Brazil. Anyway hope you got the traps back without having to dig up the whole yard to find them.

This week has been a lot better here in Bayamon. Although we still have been knocking a lot and have only 1 new investigator, we've realized that maybe Heavenly Father has something else in mind for us here in Bayamon this transfer. We have been spending a lot more time contacting inactive members because our ward has so many. We have had some really great lessons with them and they have all been very excited to see us. Most of them have practically no contact with the church, because some have been active for close to ten years. Some of them have been inactive so long that most of the members don't know them. Some of them have even been through the temple. Our plan is to start bringing members to teach the menos activos, so that we can get the ward members more involved and they can get to know the menos activos. Although we are not sure what happened that caused these members to go inactive we know that they still have strong testimonies and have great memories of the church.

We also had two amazing lessons with some investigators this week that we are very excited about. We have a family that we found a few weeks ago that we taught the first lesson to. We were going to watch the DVD of the restauration with them but their DVD player wasn't working. We started to teach the second lesson and it was amazing. Odalis, the mother had told us before that her father had died about a year ago. She started asking us so many questions, like where is her Dad and what is it like there? Does he remember her? Will they see him again? When we die will we remember our life here on earth? We weren't able to answer her questions but we left her with several chapters of the Book of Mormon to read and told her not to worry that we would return and finish teaching the Plan of Salvation and that we would address all of her questions. It was a really great lesson. Her daughter-in-law who is a less active member who grew up in Provo, UT was there listening too and I know that she felt the spirit too. Her son who is always there but never really sits down and listens, started to listen and ask questions as well like does he know that I am his grandson. The spirit was very strong. We are very excited to go back and finish teaching them Lesson 2. As I was studying today I was searching for the answers to her questions in The Book of Mormon and in Preach My Gospel, I was so excited at the things that I found. The Book of Mormon truly does answer the questions of the soul, as Preach My Gospel calls them. I am extremely grateful for the Plan of Salvation and the hope that it brings to our lives.

Another lesson that was very good was with a couple named Maria and Benjamin. They are references from members in another ward in our stake but the sisters gave them to us once they realized that they within our boundaries. They live in Naranjito very far away almost 45 minutes to drive out there and because Maria is going through Chemotherapy we haven't been able to teach them in several weeks. But we were finally able to go and teach them and we did a review of the restauration and talked about The Book of Mormon. The spirit was very strong as Maria told us that she knew that the book was true and we talked about Joseph Smith. Its so sad to see the trial that they are going through right now but it is so great to see the joy and the hope that they have on their faces when we talk about the gospel. As she prayed at the end of the lesson and thanked Heavenly Father for the peace that the Book of Mormon and our message has brought to her, wow! It is so cool to see the way the gospel can help people and bring them the peace and the joy that they are looking for. Even though its been a pretty slow couple of weeks and we don't have very many investigators we are very excited about those that we do have. So things are looking much better in Bayamon. I've been feeling a little down after almost an entire transfer without many new people to teach but I've learned that its not about how many people you find but the individual people that you teach and the way the Book of Mormon and the doctrines of the Restauration and the Plan of Salvation can change people for the better. We are truly blessed to know these things!

Hermana Barker