7 June 09

Short message to Davis, the parents really arent as crazy as they seem. (Whats with that? - Editor and Parent)

Ya, so this past Saturday we baptized Gloria, and there is a picture attached of her, me and my comp. The water was freezing, and there was an 8 year old getting baptized too, but because the water was so cold he wouldn't go all the way into the water. Took him nearly half an hour to get baptized. But aside from that, all the messages were good and when Gloria bore her testimony it was incredibly strong. I was the one to baptize her, solely by chance, because she wrote si on one piece of paper and no on another, crumpled them up, threw them in the air and i picked up the one that said si. After that, we asked why she didn't want her cousin Lorenzo to baptize her, and she said that Lorenzo will always be there for her, but i want to remember the Elders that knocked on my door and taught me, and i think this is a good way to be able to remember you. It was interesting how she explained it... or at least how i understood it.
And now that we have those baptisms, we need to challenge a lot more, because we don't have many more with a baptismal date.
Well, this past Tuesday was an interview with President, and that was great, we finally had some good food (pancakes and tacos) for breakfast and lunch. But more than that, i actually had a good interview. My first was hardly anything, just a few questions about my health and the language, but this time it was actually very helpful. I expressed my concern that i still don't know hardly anything about the forms or anything because my trainer never fills anything out except the baptismal record. He knows that I have had a bad childhood on the mission, so hopefully it will just get better. And next change we will have our new President. Interesting start for the two years.
Love you guys.

1 June 2009

Well I have a pretty cool story, because Gloria is going to be baptized this Saturday, and Jhonatan just got baptized last Saturday. But i think i´ll just stick to Gloria´s story. So we were talking with her a little bit after a lesson, and after teaching her friend Paula. We just kind of casually asked how she knew our message was true, you know, how she got an answer to her prayer. I really didn´t expect the answer she gave us. She just said, ¨Well i didn´t ever pray to know if your message was true.¨ And i was like... what!? But it was really cool, because of the next thing she said. ¨I didn´t need to, when you were teaching me I could feel the Spirit telling me, so when I prayed, it wasn´t to know if it was true, it was more just thanking God for telling me that it was true.¨ And then i was like... wow. But it reminded me of the gifts of the spirit, especially in D&C 46:14, where one of the gifts is to believe in our words.
Anyways, a quick update, we had a meeting at the CCM a few days ago to listen to President Snow of the 70, which was definitely interesting and lead me to focus my personal study in a bunch of new areas of the gospel. It was really enlightening what he said about the trend of brothers in the Book of Mormon and in the history of the church. Calder, it made me miss you a bunch. But ya, its was really interesting how he compared the influence of brothers like Sam and Nephi, and then Nephi and Lehi later on, and Joseph and Hyrum. Pretty cool talk. News from this past week, we had a baptism and also had a change for the day and i worked with Elder Chuan, and really, i hope that we can be companions eventually, because he is really just focused on helping people. And because we have another baptism this week, we´ll have another change. I´m thinking this is motivation for me to challenge more people to baptism.
Love you all!!!