The blog of me: October 25, 2010

Hola Mamá!

Glad to hear that the new baby arrived safely and that she is doing well along with the mommy. I'd love to see some more pictures! Wait...you did send some to gmail, so I'll have to take a look at those in just a minute.

Elder Kester...or rather, Camaron wrote me as well and told me about the visit he made to you all. I'm glad you got to meet him - I love that guy. I hope he didn't tell you anything too embarassing, hahaha. We had an amazing time as companions - I'll never forget that guy. I didn't know that he was in that ward, but that's neat.

Well, we had a baptism this last weekend! Wooooo! It was a really cool experience - the last time we had a baptism pretty much nobody from the ward came. The ward has been struggling a bit lately, but we've started to work with all the leaders more and they're all really excited, and we're having much better results. About 50 people came to the service, and 117 to the Sunday meetings. So we're very happy about how things are going here in San Martín.

Christopher's baptism

Today we had a zone activity and watched the Singles 2nd Ward. Everyone was just cracking up about all the stereotypes and stuff in that. You know what, I enjoyed it. I'd watch it again - that series is very cleverly written. Afterwords we had a water balloon fight. I had avoided getting wet, so some of the missionaries got a big pan full of water and chased me down and soaked me. They did that to everyone who stayed dry, haha. Good times.

We have MAAAANY investigators, but I wanted to share about one in particular with you all. Her name is Elizabeth, and we met her about 4 weeks ago. We found her doing door-to-door contacts and when we got to her house she came out and was dressed in black and crying. We asked her what had happened and she said, ''Everything that shouldn't have happened has happened.'' We found out that her husband had passed away just a day or two before and that a few years ago her daughter had also passed away. She was just...depressed - lost. For a good while we just listened to her and let her cry, and then we asked her if we could sing a hymn. We sang her Nearer My God To Thee....I've never felt the power of that song more than in that moment. Ever since then she has had us sing at least one hymn every time we pass by. For about 3 weeks she kind of disappeared - she went out to the country side to be with her mother and get away from everything. But when she got back she called us and asked us to come over. Turns out her neighbor is a less-active member, so we went over to the member's house and watched Finding Faith In Christ, which was also a very spiritual experience. The next day she asked us how to be able to be a member of our church and what she would have to do to participate. She asked about baptism and basically put her own baptismal date - the Lord prepared her, I have no doubt about that.

Well, I believe that's about all I've got for this week. I hope you're all doing well! Send me pictures of the halloween stuff! I might just dress up as a missionary this year...last year I was boring and dressed up as a missionary. Got to mix things up a little, right? Hehe. Well, I'll look forward to hearing from you next week. Love and miss you all tons!