I arrived here in Yopal (my new area) on Thursday at 5:30 in the morning. It was about an 8 hour bus ride. I had to wait until Wednesday to leave because all of the Elders in the MTC were getting ready to head out into the field, and I had to accompany one of them on the bus to Yopal. Cool thing about being here in Yopal, it's called the promised land! Also the land of the forgotten (Elders). There are literally only 6 missionaries in the entire city of Yopal. Our zone is spread out by about a six hour bus ride to a city called Sogamoso Duitama. That means that our zone-leaders live six hours away haha. The ward here in Yopal is a little weird too. It's not actually a ward its a branch because there is only one chapel here in this entire city. It's pretty dang big. The Yopal branch is apart of the stake in Sogamoso Duitama. Presidente Valladares told us the he wants to create a stake here in Yopal! We are working very hard to make sure that is possible. The Problem here in Yopal is that there are like 900 less active members, and only 250 something that are attending church regularly. 900!! We are making plans in our District to start finding all of the less-active members. We have a lot of work to do here, but I'm super excited to be out here and be apart of this work. Out of the 6 missionaries living here, 4 of us live in the same house. Elder Mcfadden, Elder Mackay, Elder Pumacondor, and me.
We got here early on Thursday morning. Immediately exiting the bus I felt exactly what I felt when I stepped out of the bus in Cúcuta, but even hotter and more humid. Elder Mackay (New Elder) and I waited around for about an hour in the terminal. When our companions arrived they were surprised that we had arrived to early in the morning and didn't think that we'd be coming in until later that day. My new companion is Elder Pumacondor. If you know Spanish you know how SICK that name is. Just think of the Puma brand socks haha. I got all of my stuff unpacked and we got straight to work. The people here are so friendly! It reminds me of Cúcuta again. Just about anyone you talk to on the street here will invite you into their homes to hear our message.
I don't have a lot of time so I just wanna share a story from this Sunday. It was about 8:30pm. We had set goals on Thursday to find 20 investigators to teach and set 4 baptismal dates. We had set 3 baptismal dates since Thursday and had 2 more investigators to find. We prayed for the guidance of the Holy Ghost and within minutes we passed by a house. In the house there were a a bunch of dudes chillin with there shirts off. We shouted into their house from a distance asking if we could come in to share a message of Jesus Christ with them. This huge guy named Henry said of course! SO we walked in and sat down. When we got into the house we found about 8 more people that wanted to join us in the message that we were going to share. As we shared the message of the Restoration everyone was really interested and started shouting out answers whenever we asked questions haha. When we started to get near to the end of the lesson we remembered our goal of one more baptismal date that we needed to extend. We figured that a lot of the people that night in the house would accept our invitation to be baptized, but it didn't turn out like that. One by one everyone started dipping out of the lesson. Some of them talked about how they were catholic and not looking to be baptized "twice". Until it got down to just Henry (the guy that invited us in) and a lady named Nelsy. She had many doubt about here catholic church about the need to baptize infants etc.. Long story short, it came down the question and Henry had told us no. So it was just her! Elder Pumacondor asked her if she would be willing to take this step and be baptized by the proper authority of God. She said YES! It was amazing to see the Holy Ghost working in the lesson. The Lord will never let us fail if we on his errand! I know this is true!
Love You all!
Elder Horton
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