Importance of Friends...and the Book of Mormon for our mission

We almost forgot yesterday that it was Valentine´s Day because they don´t celebrate here. Also I didn't know that today was President`s Day because I don´t have a gringo [American] calendar and I don´t see the gringo holidays, and they don´t celebrate it here either. I´m just going to give a quick update to the week.

It was a rough week. The problems with the funds aren´t resolved yet, but we´re working with half the office to get that resolved this week. The mission doesn´t have Libros de Mormón [copies of the Book of Mormon], the Sec. Registros already asked them, but they haven´t gotten here yet, apparently the Distribution Center in Bogotá has had some difficulties, that´s what they´ve told us.

So, our fecha Carlos Velasquez is having a hard time progressing because he doesn´t have a Libro de Mormón [Book of Mormon]. He has a couple friends that are members and expressed to one his preocupation [concern] that he might not get to his fecha [baptism] because he´s progressing so slowly, and it´s just because he doesn´t have a LdM [BofM] to read. We´re going to be reading with him and we did a bit of that the last time.

They cut our water in the house Saturday and we don´t have any idea why, but we went to La Granja to sleep in the house of our LD [District Leader], Élder Muñoz (who was my comp in Cereté) and shower there, and I took advantage of the opportunity to talk with him a bit about the difficulties of Zenú, our area. We are expecting many more results this week.

The sun came out this week and we are más o menos [more or less] dying. The other day the street was so hot that it was burning our feet through the shoes.

I was assigned a talk in Church yesterday and I felt it was important to talk about friends. Really, the importance of making friends with people who aren't active in the church, be they less-active or not baptized. The activity in the Church shouldn't depend on if they feel comfortable or fellowshipped by the members because it should be a given. Their activity should depend solely on their own testimony. I´ve met too many people on the mission that don´t go to church because they don´t have friends there and the members think that being their ´friend´ is visit them every week or month and invite them to church. A friend would communicate with the person often, invite them to things, spend time with them outside of their callings or responsibilities, serve them, help them out, and there just isn't enough of that in the Church in general.  It makes a huge difference, though.

Always great,

Elder Hicken