Letters from Meredith...

26 de julio 2010
Mi querida familia y amigas,

Hola! Como estan? Ojala que ustedes estan disfrutando su verano! I hope you´re all enjoying your summer! I can´t believe it´s the end of July. When we´re busy, the time flies!
Katy, thanks so much for your e-mail! I´m so glad you found a job! I hope you love it! I never had classes in a portable, but I can imagine it would be a grand adventure!
Laura, thanks for the e-mail! The pictures are so cute! I loved seeing them! Are you going to photograph the wedding as well? I hope you get to work in a great place next year! Oh, I love the movie Emma! It´s one of my favorites! I´m totally up for watching it in a year!
Melissa, I got your letter last week! It was so fun to see Russell because I´ve heard so much about him! You look so cute together! I´m so excited for you both! Keep me posted on wedding plans! I would love to see pictures!

I´m loving the mission right now! We´ve had such a wonderful week and seen the Lord bless us so many times! The most exciting news is that Gloria was baptized on Saturday night! It was a very simple, but beautiful, program. Her son, Osvaldo (he was baptized about a month ago), baptized her. We had quite the adventure trying to heat the water with these little heaters that were made for a bucket of water rather than an entire font! After about an hour of Hermana Sargent and I dangling two of these heaters from extension cords into the font, we decided it wasn´t doing much good. So the water was pretty cold for them, but they were really sweet and didn´t complain about it. Osvaldo went into the font and then held out his hand for his mom. They were both pretty nervous. As he raised his hand to the square and prepared to said the prayer, he looked at Hermana and I and smiled and took a deep breath. I was so proud of him! He has come full-circle in the past three months. It was a very tender moment to watch him baptize his mom, and then hug her after she came up out of the water. I was so happy to be a part of it! Hermana and I sang an arrangement of ¨I Am a Child of God¨ and Gloria also bore a beautiful testimony. There weren´t a ton of people there, but I think Gloria liked it better that way.

We have two investigators with baptismal dates right now: Renato and Antonio. Yesterday after Sacrament Meeting we were disappointed and worried because Renato wasn´t there. Just as we were saying how we were going to go visit him after church, he walks in! What a blessing! He has soccer practice on some Sunday mornings, so he came a little later. He´s such a good young man. At first he was a little unsure if he wanted to be baptized, but last Tuesday night when we visited him, he told us he wanted us to mark TWO chapters in the Book of Mormon for him to read instead of just one. We couldn´t believe it! His date is set for August 7th and we´re really excited about it! There´s a lot of planning that goes into baptisms, but it´s worth every bit of it!

I taught my first lesson in English since the MTC this week! Our first night together, Hermana Sargent and I were contacting and met Bryson, a guy from Oregon who is living here with his family. He´s part of a church/mission group that is translating the Bible into tribal languages and then teaching these people about Christ. He told us we could come visit him and we had an appointment for Saturday morning. Saturday morning we were doing companion study when the phone rang. I answered it, not knowing who it was, then he said, ¨Hi, this is Bryson.¨ I about fell out of my chair! We NEVER have investigators call us! Or it´s really rare. Anyway, Hermana heard and we were both so excited! He told us something had come up for them that morning, but asked if we could come back that afternoon. Of course we quickly cleared the agenda for them. Anyone who calls and actually asks us to come can have an entire afternoon of our time! So we went and visited with him and his wife, Mindy. They´re here indefinitely because they don´t know how long it will take them to translate the Bible, and they have to learn Spanish first. They are really nice! We (another blessing) found an English Book of Mormon on one of our bookshelves and had that with us, but didn´t end up sharing it with them. We shared with them the first lesson, kind of struggling to speak in English. It´s so funny how my mind has converted to Spanish! Bryson then asked if they could share their message with us. He basically summarized the Bible for us. After Hermana and I left, we both said how we felt the power behind our testimony. I could see the understanding in Bryson and Mindy´s faces as well. I know they felt something. We invited them to church as well. We´re going to go back and visit them again this week. It might not be their time to hear the gospel, but we´re planting seeds! And I´m sure they enjoy having someone to talk to in English!

We had a funny experience with Roberto this week. He believes firmly in evolution because he has the Encarta program on his computer and that´s the basis of all his knowledge. There are pictures of fossils in this program and so Roberto doesn´t believe that Adam and Eve were created by God; rather, he believes we evolved from monkeys. He believes in the Bible, and we read with him in Genesis where it says that God created man in His image, but he still doesn´t believe it. Saturday morning he was waiting for us with pictures of fossils pulled up on his computer. It was kind of comical. We just testified to him that we are created in the image of our Heavenly Father. We challenged him to read a chapter in the Book of Mormon on faith and then pray about it. He didn´t come to church yesterday, so we´ll see what happens this week. He´s such a good man, but the tendency to believe everything that is scientific is hard to overcome!

Well, that´s about all the news here. I have a strong testimony that the Lord knows each of us and has a plan for each of us. He is at the helm of this work and it will be done in His time and in His way. I love you all and hope you´re doing well! I would love to hear from you!

Con amor,
Hermana Cozzens