We have an investigator that will be getting baptised this week, whose name is Vicente Rios, but I don´t feel like writing about him today (I´ll probably write some stuff about him next week) I would rather write about the Gutierrez familily.
The Gutierrez family is a large family of about 30 people (with all of the cousins, uncles, grandkits, etc.) They are all members, but out of the 30ish people, there are only 2 that actually go to church regularly and 1 of those 2 is mentally handicapped. We have been teaching to a couple members of this family to try to activate them. Sunday we decided to plan a giant family home evening Saturday with the 30 of them plus their friends that they could invite, and the whole family was exited for the family home evening. Wednesday, they called us with the news that Christian, a young 19 year old member of the family had been murdered.
That was devistating news obviosly for the whole family, and also left me pretty bummed out because I had taught Cristian like 5 or 6 times and considered him a good friend. It also left, the community pretty worried because bermejo is a small town and things like this don´t normally happen here.
I´m not going to go very much into the details, but Cristian, although he was a good kid, he did have the reputation of being a mujeriego (player, or cheater). What the police and the family think is what happened was that he was going out with someone´s girlfriend, and that that person got mad and drunk and killed him, especially because they found some threating text messages of that nature.
They asked us to go to the viewing as well as the funeral, and we went to comfort the family. In the viewing, his aunt had a panic attack and we gave her a priesthood blessing of comfort.
We asked the grandma (who is the only active member and basically the head of the whole family) if she still wanted to do the family home evening. She replied, "claro que sí, seguimos egual". We did the family home evening with the whole family, which was a beatiful experience in the which we talked to them a TON do about temples and the need that they all had to go to the temple and the need that they had to do the work for themselves and for Christian.. Even more beatiful was that yesterday, the entire family of 30ish people came to church. They took up like 4 rows in the chapel. Afterward all of the adults in the family lined up outside of the branch president´s office because they wanted to be interviewed. There were so many that the district president (who also happened to be there) had to help with the interviews. The branch president later told us that pretty much all of them had the goal to go to the temple in January and they asked for interviews to ask how to prepare for the temple!
I´ll let you know more about them and Vicente next week,
Elder Casdorph
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