ELDER BERMUDEZ & I ARE STILL TOGETHER IN SARANDI GRANDE!!!

Hola Todos...


We have been blessed with the opportunity to stay together here in Sarandi Grande (Elder Bermudez and I) for at least six more weeks.  We have been extremely blessed this week and have seen many miracles here.  We had a zone conference with President Arnold from the Seventy on Thursday and we learned many things and are going to see many great changes here in the mission.  His focus of everything that we talked about was what things we are going to do differently here in the mission to raise the bar and get out of the normal and into the potential of the mission.  He said that for the last 5 years the numbers and efforts of the missionary work here in Uruguay have been average and flat... because the efforts of the missionaries here have been just that.  Then he went on to introduce some new ideas of what we can do to do things differently to achieve different and better results as missionaries.   We made a list of about 20 things and we are all very excited and happy with what is going to happen here in the mission.  He also said that he is going to have us stay in our areas for longer periods of time to help us focus more on where we are than where we might be going.  He said that we could be in an area for up to 8 months at a time, not the usual 3-4 months that was happening in the mission before.  We have started applying these changes and have found great success and miracles in our area here in Sarandi Grande.

We also had our big two day activity here in our area this Friday and Saturday.  We had invited about 500 families from all over Sarandi Grande and had about 40 people come to the activity which was about what we had expected.  The majority of them were youth and children because the activity was full of games, talent show, and candy.  But the miracle that came from this activity was that we found 5 new investigators, one inactive sister reactivated, and we had 8 nonmembers in church this Sunday!  We had 30 people at church this week -- a new record!!!  We now have a lot more people in the streets that wave at us and are willing to talk to us and all the kids in the street are much more kind when they see us!

The only bad news is that the one investigator that we had planned to be baptized this Saturday didn`t come to church so we have to wait another 2 weeks to baptize her, but the wonderful news is that we now have about 30 investigators that are really good and have potential of being baptized in the next two months!  Thanks to this activity and many other miracles from the Lord we have been blessed with many great people who are genuinely interested in our message!  And also for the first time in a long time we have nearly every hour of our time set with different people to teach for the next two days which is really hard to do here in Sarandi where the people don`t want to commit to a time ever.  Miracles are raining down from heaven here in Sarandi Grande and we are very excited to work with these wonderful people here.  With these miracles we have an opportunity to double the size of the Sarandi Grande branch here in the next two months.

As part of the things ¨Different¨ that we are going to do in the area is offer more piano lessons in the church for our investigators so they can become more comfortable with coming to the church.  I had to drop two of my students here this last week because they weren`t willing to practice, but we gained two new and excited students yesterday!  I know that our Heavenly Father is a God of Miracles and that His Son, Jesus Christ is the Savior and Redeemer of the world.  The Book of Mormon is true and the word of God along with the Bible.  This church is true and is guided by revelation given to our prophet today, Thomas S. Monson directly from our Heavenly Father. 

I love you all so much and I know that Heavenly Father loves you all even more.

Elder Gardner

P.S. to answer your question... In Sarandi Grande we have to walk to get around the area which can be a lot of walking in one day but also can be a lot of excersise and blessings to find people in the street as well.  Love you.