The pictures-- the star is the Star of El Paso, it's on the mountain side facing east, and it's on every single night. :)
X marks the Mexico! Yeah, that's Juarez, the Mexican equivalent to El Paso. I don't think that I zoomed in at all for that picture-it's that close!!
Anyways, we had/are having an epic miracle happen to us!
We're at the downtown transfer station, and we decide to go outside (they had a TV inside, watching the news, and we didn't want to hear about how "huge it was going to be" to sit by the bus stop that we wanted. We walked outside, and we hear this lady just yelling cuss words and wanted everyone there to see how her language was all the colors of the rainbow- but she was sitting at the same bus stop we wanted. So we sat at the other end of the 20 foot bench. She sees us and yells, "You waiting for the 36?" "Yeah." "Come here."
We were prepared to feel that rainbow, but instead, she shows us a picture on her phone of a positive pregnancy test (that we obviously needed to see). We find out that her name is Stephanie (weird, right??) she's 25, pregnant with her 3rd kid (we think the other 2 went to foster care), unmarried, getting kicked out of her apartment, and is basically just wallowing in the "life-sucks" attitude. So what do we do? We kept talking to her. The next day, we had a lesson with her- the Restoration, at the church, and Elder Proctor says it was one of the most spiritual lessons he's had his whole mission. We committed her to baptism on October 29, to which she said yes, and that she'd read the BOM. At the end of the lesson, she said one of the most sincere prayers I've ever heard. We set up another appointment for the next day, during exchanges, so it would be up to me and Elder Calvillo (a zone leader) to talk to her. About 2 hours before the appointment, she calls us and tells us she's in the hospital-- so we decided that we're gonna go to the hospital. Well, she was in the ER- we don't know why, not our business, and we got there while the doctor was asking her questions. The one we remember is him asking what religion she is and she replied, "Mormon" (Made our whole day!). Found out that she had done the reading we left her, and that she had started the BOM from the beginning- and was just starting Lehi's dream. We read that with her, (that's not what we had planned, but she was super distracted and just started reading it out loud to us before we could say anything) and we told her that we'd be back tomorrow. Tomorrow came, we went to visit her, and she had been released to go to a psychiatric hospital, that WE HAVE NO IDEA WHICH ONE SHE GOT SENT TO. We called her and called her, but no response. We couldn't go by her house because she no longer had one. So, to sum up, she literally dropped off the face of the planet.
Until today.
She calls us during personal study, tells us which hospital she's at, and that she wants us to come teach her, but that we can only do that on Tuesdays and Saturdays at 7:30. So, she can't get baptized the 29th, because in this mission you have to go to sacrament meeting twice in order to be baptized, and we don't know when she can get out of that place, but yeah, she's super prepared to be baptized, and we are not letting her drop off the face of the planet again!
It's been awesome, and, as it's been said before, "The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, and calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every climb, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say, 'The work is done.'" -Joseph Smith
"Shall we not go on in so great a cause?" D&C 128:15
Te whanaunga mo ake tonu!
--
Elder Eli James Dial
PS- my mission motto- "Everything is hard until it becomes easy. We just have to know what to do and how to do it."
The work is staring us all in the face- what's keeping you from doing it?
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