improving my relationship with the Lord

Hey everyone!!

I´m staying here in Fuenlabrada for another transfer with Elder Schwenke! We´re excited to stay here together for another, this will be our 3rd transfer.

We had such a good week, I feel like we were very blessed by the Lord in a lot of ways. We both were really trying to work hard, doing our best, and we saw lots of results too. Another huge blessing was that our Peruvian investigator, Esperanza, finally came to church!!! We´ve been making so many plans and goals to help our investigators come to church, and for a while none of them came. I knew we were doing our part, as much as we could do, but I think many of our investigators don´t have the strongest desires maybe to be really acting and doing something. They´re just spiritually lazy.

We´ve been meeting so many atheists lately, sometimes I wonder the percentage of people who believe in God and those who don´t. It´s really sad to see so many people say that because of so many problems, they don´t believe. I´ve heard so many times recently ´how could God exist with all of this wickedness?!¨. In fact, we got talking to one lady, possibly a bit drunk, and she went off on her life, how horrible and sad it is and that God has never helped her. She said that a while ago she believed in God and was happier (well obviously.), and now she´s not. My comp and I had mixed feelings of the need and wanting to help her in her life, to find this happiness, and at the same time a feeling that was telling us no. She kind of freaked me out with her facial expressions and the way she talked. We´ll see what happens, don´t worry. If we go to visit her again it´ll be in the chapel and we´ll have at least five other male members of the branch that could protect us. In sacrament meeting yesterday we finally got a branch president! Haven´t had one for about 3 months or so (my whole time here). He´s going to do a great job here and really help the members. There´s a huge problem of gossiping here, and the formation of clicks within the members. Many of the people here have gotten offended at someone else for having said something or not saying hi to them at church. It´s a bit frustrating in my point of view, and I´d like it to stop and feel like we´re just on one team. An investigator for the other companionship even noticed it and told them that she loved the church, that it spiritually filled her a lot better than any other church she´s been too, but that she does not like how the members talk bad about the other ones. I think it´s improving though, slowly but surely.

In one of the classes we had, talking about prayer, the teacher said something that really impacted me. ¨Let us remember, that the Atonement was in fact a prayer.¨ Never before have I thought of it like that, how the Lord really was praying throughout that experience and conversing with the Lord. In this next week, let us remember this moment as well and rely on our Heavenly Father during our challenging experiences and trials.

I hope we all can have the opportunity soon to personally be able to gain a better relationship with the Lord and to find out truly how much strength and power we can receive to better deal with those moments.

I love you all so much, thank you for your love and prayers, You all mean so much to me. Have a great day!

Love Elder Franson