A Key to Accessing the Privileges of Being a Member of the Lord's Church

This week we said goodbye to Elder Alvarado. He welcomed us into our mission almost fourteen months ago and has been a huge help to me and my wife. He completed an honorable mission and one dedicated to the service of the Lord. I miss him a lot.

For the past two weeks we had the privilege to work with two wonderful young sister missionaries in our ward. The senior companion is from Guatemala and I don’t think she reaches four feet in height, but she is a giant of a missionary. She and the other sister from Brazil have done an incredible amount of work in a very short time. I am inspired and awestruck by them both. It has been several months since my wife and I had the opportunity to work in the field with the young missionaries. It is incredible to see the dedication of these young sisters to the Lord and his work.

The Lord has blessed us with the opportunity to teach a woman, a grandmother, aptly named Magdalena. We look forward to going over to her house. All of her children and grandchildren live in the same compound and it’s easy to see that they all love her and are greatly influenced by her. The more we have come to know Magdalena the more we love her. She was living the Gospel of Jesus Christ before we ever met her. She spends much of her time serving her children and grandchildren and neighbors. She is very intelligent and often sees deep meaning to the questions we ask her. She wants to be baptized, but wanted to wait to surprise her son, who was the first member of her family to be baptized, on his birthday. I think we have convinced her that she is ready to be baptized long before that. We will help her surprise him anyway.

Last night I spoke at a stake conference in Cuautla in President Crickmore’s place because he had  another commitment. My wife didn’t know that she was asked to speak too and neither did I until they announced her name. I told her that Heavenly Father would be with her, but I didn’t need to. She stood and gave her first talk in Mexico in a wonderful and heartfelt fashion. One of the things I told congregation was that I felt a great key for obtaining the privileges or power and blessings of being a member of the Lord’s Church is in doing missionary work. It is very important to Him and He is so willing to pour down blessings upon the heads of those who do this work. Nothing compares to this. We will be serving another mission.