All is well here in Tacna! I will have to be short today, but I promise next weeks email will be the best! It's finally starting to get a little bit colder which is nice considering we walk all day long. We had another baptism on Saturday so obviously it was a great week!! Since January we have been teaching a 10 year old kid, Victor. His mom is a member but less active. We started teaching them both, with the intention to reactivate the mom and baptize her son. This family has had so many hardships.. every time we go to their house to share a message with them the mom tells us a story about her life. There are so many people here with trials and difficulties like her, it breaks my heart. It makes me so grateful to be from the United States, to be from a family where I know I'll always have a roof over my head and I don't have to worry about when my next meal is going to be. Victor was finally baptized this last Saturday and his mom shared her testimony with us after the baptism. She told us how grateful she was to have come back to church and to see her son baptized. She explained to us that the problems she was having in her life started to disappear when she started applying what we taught to her and her son in her life. The gospel of Jesus Christ is REAL and it helps us with our day to day trials. It gives us hope when we want to give up or when we feel like we can't keep going. It is the only thing we can truly rely on to lift us up when we've fallen down. We cannot completely put our trust in the things of the world because they are not stable. Money runs out. Work is never constant. Sometimes even friends and family fail us. But Christ is infinite. His sacrifice is eternal. He will always be there for us, but are you there for him?

¨And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.¨

Helaman 5:12 (The Book of Mormon)

Make it a good week everyone!

xoxo

Hermana Celardo