Brandon's Ecuadorian Tales

Hey everyone. This week has gone well. Our zone finished the month with 15 baptisms which is pretty good. The record is 17 so we`re hoping to break it in October. The mission set a new record this weekend with 83 baptisms in one weekend so that was exiting. We had 8 of them in our zone.

Elder Archundia and I had some interesting experiences this week. Last week we called a reference that we had received from some other missionaries. They told us that the guy came up to them on a bus and asked for a book of mormon so they gave him one and took down his address and phone number. So last week we called him and set up an appointment. The appointment was this Tuesday and 10 am so we left early to get there on time and everything. He had just told us that he lives in an apartment complex called “puerta del sol” but when we got to where we thought it was we realized that there are like 10 apartment complexes called “puerta del sol” all right next to each other. We were kinda lost but at about 10:10 Marcelo(that’s the guys name) came out and found us because apparently he had been waiting for us and figured that we must have got lost. He took us to his house. The first thing I noticed when we walked in was that he had a huge book shelf full of all sorts of books and some astronomy posters on his wall with pictures of galaxies and universes. And his book of mormon was sitting right there on his table. It turns out that this guy is super smart and reads all sorts of history books and has even written one. Anyway, we sat down and started talking and he told us that he had already started reading the book of mormon and had read the introduction and the first 18 chapters of 1st nephi. Then he started asking us a whole bunch of questions about the historical context of the book of mormon and about somethings that he had read. He even started talking about 1st nephi chapter 13 when nephi talks about “the great and abominable church” and started going of about how he thinks it must be the catholic church because of all the stuff that happened in the dark ages. I don`t think i`ve ever had an investigator that understood what they read from the book of mormon as well as he did. He told us that he thought the Book of Mormon was true and that it made sense that Christ would come to the Americas. We asked him what made him so interested in the Book of mormon when he first saw the missionaries and he started telling us his life story. It was kinda long so I’ll paraphrase it. When he was younger(hes like 53 now) he lived a crazy life and did a lot of stupid things and eventually ended up in the hospital. He never believed in Christ but after all the he had been through he started having desires to believe in Christ. He had desires to fix his life and basically to apply the atonement in his life. But he said it was a really hard concept for him to accept because he had never believed in Christ and just couldn`t bring himself so believe. Someone had given him a book of mormon and so he started reading a little bit. One night when he was sleeping he had the same dream that Lehi had about the tree of life and he said that half way through his dream he woke up but his dream didn`t stop. After that he started believing in Christ. He lent his book of mormon to a friend and never got it back. Years later he was walking through a huge park here in quito and heard someone playing a guitar. He turned around and saw someone on a tree stump playing guitar and said that it was the most beautiful music that he has ever heard so he went to listen to him. When he finished playing Marcelo applauded him and asked him what his name was but the guitarist replied that he couldn`t tell him his name because he wouldn`t understand it. Anyway, long story short… He ended up running into this mysterious guitarist guy in various occasions and every time he saw him it was like something surreal was happening. The last time that he ran into him he asked him again who he was and he said that he couldn`t tell him but told him the he needed to read a book called “The book of Urantia”. Marcelo asked who wrote it and he said that it was written by angels. At this point in the story Marcelo proceeded to stand up and pull and book down from his massive book shelf. It was “the book of urantia” and told us to read the first page. It was kinda weird and said that the book caontained things that couldn`t be explained in any human laungauge but that they had tried to write them in the most understandable way possible. In the table of context I saw that it had a lot of things that talked about melquisedek and Abraham and Jesus. I`m still not exactly sure how everything fits together but something about his dream, the mysterious guitarist guy, and the “book of urantia” is what made him interested in the book of mormon . It was kinda weird because the whole situation was pretty bizarre but he seamed like a really intelligent person. Normally if someone started telling me this I would think that they were crazy but he seamed like a normal person. Anyway, He came to church with his son this Sunday and we have an appointment with him on Thursday so it will be interesting to see what happens. He already believes in the book of mormon so all we have to do now is help him see that if the book of mormon is true then everything is true and he needs to be baptized. I bet he`ll have a ton of questions though so we`ll have to explain things really well and in depth. Stay tuned until next time to see what happens… haha. If you have a few minutes maybe someone can look up “the book of uratia”. I`m kinda interested to see what is in that book that has anything to do with him being so open to the church and the book of mormom…. Or maybe it has nothing to do with it and he is just really crazy… haha…. It was an interesting experience to say the least.

Another interesting thing that happened to us this week was that on Saturday morning some jehovas witnesses rang our doorbell. We have like an intercom thing in our house so when someone rings the doorbell we just answer the phone and talk to them through the intercom. The started contacting us and asked if we could come down so that they could give us a magazine. We said yes and grabbed a liahona to give to them and went down. When we opened the door it was pretty funny to see how fast their expression changed when they saw that we were mormon missionaries. We traded magazines with them and both agreed to read.

Well i`m running out of time so i`ll have to finish here. I love you guys! I`ll talk to you next week.