Sunday, July 12, 2015

Journey into the Past...Present

Alvarados and us by a fountain in the city center.
Friday was our field day or day to relax. With our friends from Mexico, the Alvarados, we drove an hour and a half to Puebla Mexico. Puebla was just as beautiful as I remembered from my youthful mission days.


Cathedral of Puebla

All of the streets are cobbled and the cathedrals are some of the oldest in Mexico. But for me what I loved most was the way the streets and buildings stirred memories of a time long ago in January 1972 when I had walked them as a junior companion.
A park I walked as a youthful missionary
My current companion is much prettier
5 Sur was the street where we had our apartment or so my memory told me. I remembered walking in the park in the center of the city with my companion, Elder Angeano, and him telling me that he was jealous of the way that that chicas were looking at me, the north American. I hadn’t noticed. The more we walked the streets that I had not walked for forty-three years the more my memories stirred.

After a while, I really wanted to meet someone in Puebla. I had recorded a list of names of people that I had taught in a bible. My daughter had photographed those pages and emailed them to me, but I had little hope of meeting anyone. The youngest would be in their fifties by now and the oldest over a hundred. As I was thinking this, suddenly the Alvarados called to us from behind. They had just met a woman with whom they worked in the Mexico City Temple. She lived here in Puebla. What’s more, when she heard who I was and why I was here, she gave up her plans for the day and spent the rest of it with us, helping us find LDS churches and giving us the numbers of stake presidents. The Lord had heard by thoughts as a prayer.
The Alvarados, me, and Marta, the sister that spent the day with us.



The Church in Puebla has grown incredibly in the last forty years. When I was there, there were only eight of us missionaries. Now, there are four missions and hundreds of missionaries and several stakes. My only disappointment for the day was that no one we talked to knew anything about the fifteen people that I had helped baptize. But at the end of the day, the wonderful sister who had given up her day to spend with us, wrote done all the names and said she was going to find them.  

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