Matt's email 10/04/2010

This past week has been absolutely awesome. On Tuesday I went down to Mendoza with the zone leaders and the other district leader to a leadership training meeting deal. It started on tuesday and lasted until Wednesday night. It was awesome. President and the assistants talked a lot about getting our districts and zones excited about the work. He told us that as a mission we are going to have baptized over a thousand people this year. That is the goal at least and we are going to kill it. It was also great because we got to eat some Hermana Lindahl brownies and way legit food. On Tuesday afternoon we were all assigned to go to particular areas around Mendoza and work the rest of the day. I was put with an Elder that just transferred into my old zone. We were all challenged to put as many baptismal commitments as we could and were told the winner was going to get a tie. The elder I was with and I committed 5 people to baptism in one afternoon and ended up winning the tie. It was an incredible day. Then just to top of the week yesterday we were walking to the stake center to watch conference and we were approached by some random guy on the street. He literally ran up from behind us and chased us down and he told us that he had a question about the bible that was really bothering him. Since we were way close to the church I told him we were going to run in, drop our stuff off, grab a Bible and that we would be right out. It turns out that nobody in the church had a Bible in spanish so armed with my English Bible, Elder Vazquez and I went out to try and help this guy. He had been reading in 2 Timothy 1 and had a ton of questions. After me trying to explain to him what the verses were saying I basically just bore testimony to him and told him that each of us are blessed with knowledge of certain things. These certain things make up a testimony that each of us possess and if we put our testimony and our trust in God, He will help us through all our trials. He went on to explain to us the problems of his life and we told him that he was about 30 minutes away from hearing from the prophet of the world. He came in, watched all the Mo Tab concert and the entire first session. It was awesome bringing in a random guy from the street to hear the prophet. It was one of my mission goals that was fulfilled. Last cool story of the week. On Friday I was doing divisions with an Elder from another area. We had an appointment that fell through and so we just started walking and knocking doors until the next appointment we had. The whole time we were telling each other that if we walked to the end of the street and knocked every door some sort of miracle was going to happen. They are always in the Ensign right? Anyway after entering a few houses and walking a ton we arrived at the last house of the street. Pretty common story so far... But this man was too far from common. We started to talking about the concept of eternal families and God and all that good stuff then he assured us that he had a spot reserved for him in Heaven. After seeing a pack of cigarettes on the table I asked him if he had been taking care of the blessings God had given him. He asked if it was becasue of the box of cigarettes that I had seen that caused me to ask the question. I told him that it was and he replied, "you have no idea." He then told us his entire life story. When he was 9 he started smoking weed. By the age of 13 he was doing and selling cocaine. He bought his first brand new truck when he was 14. He continued this lifestyle until he was 24 and decided after killing 17 people that he was tired of that kind of life. He also taught me a great lesson: God can forgive man, Man can forgive man, but it is nearly impossible for man to forgive himself. It was awesome. I can´t say that we put a baptismal date with this guy, sadly, but we are going to continue teaching him and hopefully things will work out.
To answer the conference question... Yes we had the opportunity to watch all the sessions in English. It was great. I absolutely loved every talk. The themes were all pretty common: Follow the teachings of the prophet, repent and live a life full of faith and the Spirit, and make wise, careful decisions. Man it was just awesome. I hope everything goes well at home. It sounds like Dave Salo is going to have a lot of fun with his new toy. I love you all and wish you all a great week!
Love
Elder Burr