Can Soap Be Dirty?

So I was taking my shower the other day—and one quick fun fact about Uruguay is that the bathrooms are horrible and I will show you all pictures someday. So the toilet and the shower are basically in the same spot in our bathroom. Most bathrooms here are only 3 feet by 3 feet, so the toilet and the TP always get soaked every time one showers. Anyway, so the inevitable finally happened. My whole mission I have known at some point I would accidentally drop my soap in the toilet. It happened. I stood there in the slow drips of my shower, (we shower in drips because we only have 3 minutes of hot water, but if you do it in slower drips you can have 6 minutes of hot drips), and I just stood there looking at my wonderful strawberry scented soap bar sitting in the toilet bowl. It was a very tough moment for me. I thought about it: Can soap be dirty? If I reach in and pull it out I can still use it right? Soap is pure cleanliness. I could scrape off a layer I guess and still use it, but it is pretty small already... And, after a minute of thinking about it, I decided I didn’t need to be cheap or super desperate and I just opened a new bar of soap. But I still ask the question, can soap be dirty?

So we had a baptism on Saturday of one Noelia Melina Nuñez Benitez, a 10 year old girl who is smarter than I was when I was 16. We have been working with the family and activating the family for a few months. I didn’t want to push it. And finally they asked us if she could be baptized. It is always good when they ask, and she asked for herself. We didn’t even have to challenge her. I really like doing it that way sometimes. Anyway, she is SO amazing. I love this family so much. They are such a good family. The dad has always been going, but the mom no. The mom is coming back and the dad comes every week with his daughter. They are SO cool. The dad Freddy is a super stud and served a mission back in the 90s here in Uruguay. Anyway, it was the best baptismal service I have been a part of here in Uruguay. The whole extended family came, and there were musical numbers; there were a lot of people that came to support her. Anyway, I was gonna say why she is so smart. She asks really profound questions that most at that age would never think of. "Why did Jesus have to suffer so much if so many were still going to reject him in the end?", "How does God answer a prayer no? I have prayed to know if the Book of Mormon is true and I felt the good feelings of the spirit so I know that it is true and was answered yes, but how does God say no?" etc... She is very sensitive to the spirit. When we started teaching her it was because she had said "Today in church I felt something really good inside. I just didn’t want to leave." After she said that her dad explained the Holy Ghost and the teaching began and 2 weeks later she was baptized.

I normally am not too excited for teaching little kids, but I daresay she was one of the best investigators I have had my whole mission. And I really think she will stay faithful in the church. She has been working on her mom. She is 10!! But she has been saying "mom, I want you to say prayers with us as a family every night", because she had recognized her mom would never actually say the prayer she would only listen. She will stay faithful. She already has friends asking her at school why she was going to the Mormon church and she just simply told them she believed and invited them to come to her baptism and some actually came. She is an amazing little girl.

We have some other possible baptisms coming up, and some really good investigators. The theme is getting them to go to church. It isn’t part of the Uruguay culture to get up on Sunday and do anything for 3 hours, unless that 3 hour activity is sitting home and drinking Mate. It is really hard to find people that are willing to go to church. I tend to give investigators 2 weeks of teaching without going to church as a maximum, and if they don’t go after that I just want to drop them. It is rare that I want to visit someone into a third week if they haven’t gone to church yet. We are looking for the elect and the elect will be willing to walk a few blocks to church on Sunday mornings.

So one last story para terminar: we clapped a door the other day (because clapping is what you do here, you rarely knock on someone’s door). It was a door already open and I saw the lady sitting at a table in her chair. We made eye contact. I don’t know who she thought she was kidding. She all the sudden drops to the floor under the table. We can still see her. She begins crawling across the floor to the other room and we watch her push aside the curtain of a door that separated that front room from the other room. She crawled out of sight and the curtain closed. ... ... I just can’t believe we are that pesado to some people that they can’t even come say "no thanks." It was comical.

I hope everyone is well and that you are all behaving and keeping the commandments. Take care!! Love you all!!

Andy