Familia,
Another week! Its been pretty good. The highlight may have
been the time change, because I got to sleep in an extra hour. :) But really, we had some cool stuff happen
this week. Karla and Carlos were baptized! And it all went fairly smoothly. The
only hitch was that the person who was supposed to give the last talk thought
it was at 6 instead of at 5, and missed everything except walked in right in
time to give her talk. But compared to last week, it was pretty stress free.
Maria y Hugo are doing awesome! Hugo got the priesthood, and
this past Sunday Maria got a calling to be the secretary in the Relief Society!
Members for life!
We found an a sweet family this past week, too. And the
story is pretty cool. A few weeks ago
all of our plans had fallen through, and we weren't really sure what to do. For
some reason though, both of us were feeling like we should try to find a former
investigator, Jesus, who neither of us had met, but whose name is written on
our white board as someone to keep trying for. Well, it didn't really make any
sense to go find him then, because we were planning on spending the day in West
Chicago, which is where we were, and he lives in St. Charles. But, because both
of us were thinking of him, we decided to go and give it a try. So we drove to
St. Charles, and found his house, and no one was there. So that was kind of a
bummer, because now we were in St. Charles, and what were we going to do there?
We decided to look through our area book and see if we could find some other
antiguos (former investigators.) So I was reading some records and picked a few
that I thought sounded promising. We put their addresses in the GPS and it
turned out that all of them lived within a couple block radius of where Jesus
lives. But, the first couple ones we tried weren't there either. So we were
getting a little frustrated, and wondering why we were supposed to be over
there, why we both felt like we needed to go find Jesus. But we tried the last
person on my list, Epitacia, and she was home. She did tell us she was busy
right then, but made an appointment for us to return. So, we were feeling
pretty excited, like she must be the reason we were here and she must be
awesome! But THEN she cancelled our appointment, and rescheduled it. And then
did it again. And then we had something come up, so we had to call her and see
if we could come by at a different time that day. We were thinking she must be
bogus, and is just going to cancel again. But she didn't, and we went over to
her house last Thursday. We were expecting it to be just here, but when we got
there two of her kids were there too and sat in on the lesson. And it was so
cool walking into that house. It just felt like we already knew this family,
like we'd been there before, and already knew and loved them. They are just so
sweet and friendly. But the even COOLER thing is, is that when we asked what
they remembered from when the missionaries taught them before, which was about
a year ago, the 9 year old daughter proceeded to tell us the WHOLE Plan of Salvation
in detail. Like she included the three degrees of glory, and spirit prison and
everything. SHE IS 9!! oh man. They are an awesome family, and they are ready
to be taught again. The only reason the missionaries stopped coming by is
because Epitacia's work got too busy, but it has just started to die down so
she has time again, I'm pretty excited to see where things go with this family.
Other pretty cool thing that happened this week: We went on
exchanges Monday and Tuesday, and I went over to Westchester. All of the
appointments they had fell through so were just doing a lot of contacting. We
contacted one man on his doorstep, and had a pretty good quality gospel
conversation with him, talked about families and all that, nothing too special,
but good. But then I got this overwhelming feeling that I needed to invite him
to be baptized right there. And I was like, no way- he is just going to say
he's already been baptized in the Catholic church, he won't even understand why
he needs to be baptized again, we haven't talked to him about why our church is
different, about the authority- nothing. But I just kept remembering something
we talked about in a meeting about how the more invitations you give the more
baptisms you'll receive, and I just felt like I needed to invited him. So,
really nervously, I told him something like, well- what we do as missionaries
is we help people return the their Heavenly Father so that they can live with
their families forever. And we know that there are certain things we need to do
to do that, like baptism. And I know that this is might be kind of weird and
early to you, but would you like to follow the example of Jesus Christ and be
baptized by someone who has the authority of God? And I can just tell you I'm
sure my Spanish got awful right there because I was so nervous. But he just
looked at me, and said yes! Yes I would ! I turns out he actually was never
baptized in the Catholic Church, and he really wants to be baptized and he
really wants to be married in a church, because he couldn't get married in the
Catholic church because he was never baptized, he just has a civil marriage. So
yeah! He wants to be baptized, so he wants to learn about our church and how he
can be baptized!
Okay. I think thats all I got for you today. We got to head
out to THE CITY pretty soon! I'm glad everything is going well there! I love hearing
from you, and I am excited to get some MAIL this week! My mailbox is sad and
empty. I have some pictures to send from Karla y Carlos' baptism, but I forgot
my camera today, so you'll get them next week.
Love you love you love you,
Les Quiero,Shaelyn
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