Elder Kade Larsen

 

There has been a lot of rioting in Colombia for the past few weeks.  The Colombian Missionary Mom site was very helpful to keep us informed of what was going on.  There was a special fast planned for Saturday and Sunday to protect the missionaries and to have the problems in the country resolved quickly so that the missionary work could move forward.  We want to thank everyone that was involved in that fast.  Many temples around the world had the Colombian missionaries on their prayer roll. It is always a worry where there is such unrest and violence but we also had faith that Heavenly Father would protect his missionaries.  We were very saddened to hear of a missionary in Colombia being shot this past weekend.  Our hearts and prayers go out to his family.  We were so grateful to hear from Elder Larsen today and to hear that things are slowly improving in Colombia.

Dear family and friends, (Edited by Cindy)   This week has been quite a bit different than usual I guess you could say. Yes, things in Colombia were a bit crazy this last week but it is getting a lot better. I think the agriculture argument has calmed down quite a bit so now there are only a few other groups that are looking for agreements with the government.  It feels like almost all types of people have a beef with the government right now. The Zone Leaders are supposed to go to Bogota this week and we don't know if they will be able to go. Supposedly everything has cooled down quite a bit compared to the past couple of weeks. But who knows if they unblocked the road to Bogota or not, hopefully. Transfers are this coming Sunday and if things are still bad by then, we probably won't have transfers. That would be kind of crazy wouldn't it? It would throw off the time scale pretty badly for a lot of missionaries. On Thursday, the Zone Leaders called us around 7 in the morning saying that we could not leave the house for any reason for the entire day. It was because throughout the country people had planned a bunch of marches so it was better to not leave the house. So NOBODY (missionaries) left their houses on Thursday. On Friday we were able to leave but only till 6 at night when we had to return to our house. When we saw the most stuff happening was on Friday morning. There is that bridge in front of our apartments and that bridge is highly used. There was a group of like 250 motorcyclists or more that blocked the bridge for a bit and then they all went to the center to block it there so it wasn't in front of our house too long.   We had the baptism on Saturday night and it turned out really great. I was able to baptize her.  My companion confirmed her at church on Sunday. My companion and I will only have one more week together here in Diamante.    This week we don't have any baptism dates because we weren't able to get our investigators to church this week. DANG IT. So Frustrating sometimes how people don't understand the importance of the gospel. We have quite a few people that we are teaching who are doing really well though so it has been really good.    Today we went on kind of a nature hike. You have NO IDEA how far we walked because we didn't really know how far it was to get there. My companion was pretty mad at me that we went. We went as a zone so I couldn't really say that we wouldn't go.     Today we are exhausted and we want to go to the house and rest a bit. I hope that you guys have a super great week. The things here in Colombia are getting better so all is well here for us. Thank you for the fast that you guys put on. It was cool to hear about it. Love ya and miss ya all =) Love Elder Larsen