DAVE

This was a tough week. but not without some cool blessings.

the great and abominable church

In mexico, cocacola is huge, at first i didn´t understand. The majority of people drink at least one cocacola every day. It is a strange thing to drink water with your meals. A returned missionary from texas told us, "man, in the US they drink plain water like all the time, it´s so wierd" because here in mexico they either drink cocacola, or like, kool aid. there is sugar in everything. In america there are laws that define how much sugar there can be in a beverage, but not here. And that is why diabetes is such a huge problem here in mexico. The company cocacola is huge, like really, they must own mexico. I´ve heard people say things like "man, seriously i haven´t had a cocacola all day, i need to rest." and every corner there is a store for cola.

dave

We are teaching a man who has had problems with drinking all of his life. Dave is about 50 years old and he lives alone and feels alone, and he is a wonderful man but he works in a store that sells cocacola and beer and a lot of his friends are just the people who buy alcohol from him and he doesn´t really have family to help him out. Dave really wants to change his life and stop drinking, we have been working with him for a long time, about 2 months and he is progressing but it is slow. Drinking has taken a lot of the good things out of his life, he drinks for days at a time, and because of his drinking his friends are fake and he feels lonely, alchoholism is really ugly. He has felt the spirit and him and one of his friends who is super humble went with us to the church two weeks ago, and this week about friday we visited him and he is excited to go to church and his friend too, and he´s telling us about how he has a white shirt and he wants to wear it, and we come back on saturday, and we know that the weekends are hard for him because that is when drinking comes as the greatest temptation for him, and we visit him on saturday and we teach a little bit and i´m like "man, dave seems really happy, he is doing really well" and in the night on saturday we come back really quick just to animate him and make sure everything is alright, and in his house there are some of his friends drinking and listening to music, and we are like oh heck what happened, and dave comes out and he is totally sober and he is like "guys, you guys are awesome, i´m doing really well, seriously don´t worry about me, i can handle this." and we are like, "okay, you seem really confident, call us if you feel the temptation to drink"

he didn´t make it to church sunday, and we found him that night drinking with one of his friends, and he he kept asking us if we were mad at him, and we assured him that he wasn´t and he cried and told us that he has never had friends like us that really want to help him. and yeah he was drunk but it was still touching, i love dave, he is truely a very good person, very humble and kind and real.