Las Lomas and Long Walks on the Beach

Dear Family,

Today we went and ran on the beach, so I'm hating myself right about now.

To start off let me tell you about the nightmare we had on Thursday morning. We had to be in the Office in Surco at 8, without traffic it takes 40 minutes to get there with traffic don't even try. We planned on leaving here at 6.30 to beat the traffic. I told the bus driver "puente benavides" which is a huge "puente" which is a bridge. And it is easy to know when to get off because the walls are all yellow. So at about 7.30 we hit traffic but we were still going to be able to make it because we were close. I was waiting, and waiting and waiting. We never passed the bridge. And all of a sudden we passed exit that takes us to the temple.. after mumbling some bad words between Spanish and Kechua we decided now would be a good time to get off the bus. So now we were stuck in the middle of Lima in the middle of rush hour and wayyy late to our meeting. Lets just say it took us 45 minute to get a taxi, and that was the best thing that happened to us. We then waited in immense traffic until we got to the office. I was not an happy elder.

I did get good news though, I found out that 3 of the people we started teaching in Pamplona got baptized. Remember Luis? The 13 year old whose parents wouldn't give permission for his baptism yeah he got baptized WITH his mom! I'm going to have to write him a letter.

An outstanding highlight this week, I listened to a BYU speech from Brad Wilcox called "His Grace is Sufficient" it isn't really recent and some of you may have already listened to it but holy it was soo good. I loved every analogy he used, I cannot explain how good it is. If you have listened to it, listen to it again and then maybe once more just incase you forgot a part.

With my old companion, Elder Streber, we found Juan. We taught a really good lesson about the Restoration and he was really interested in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. But much to our surprise at the end of the lesson he asked what we thought about families as he very quietly explained that his wife had passed away 2 and a half years ago. Obviously we were aching to be able to teach him about the Plan of Salvation but we never found him until yesterday. We talked about agency and trials and finally eternal progression which is centered on families.

The only picture I have this week is of our exchanges we had with the elders from the ward Pachacamac and we played Risk. No the gringo didn't win.

I love all you guys, thanks for the prayers and the support.

Elder Craythorne