Weekly Email

Well well well, I decided I would tell some of my story of this week in the form of photos!!!!!!
The first photo is of what happened to us last P-Day. It was raining and we decided to play soccer anyway, and as you can tell, it came out a little bit muddy the whole thing! But, amazingly fun. One of the best matches of soccer I have played in the mission.

The next photo is of a tarantula that we found on the wall of our apartment. Exciting isn´t it? Washing clothes and finding a spider like that. (Ryan, you said you wanted pictures) We killed it with a big rock, after taking pictures of course. Typical missionary thing, have something dangerous next to you, and to take a picture first. Hahaha. Oh, and this was Tuesday by the way.

The next photo is of a branch activity that we did on Wednesday night. We had a barbecue and watched The Testaments. It was pretty cool because we had some of our investigators there, so it helped them out.

I don´t have any cool photos of Thursday, so we´ll move on to Friday, the next photo. Recognize the woman in the photo? The sister that I baptized right after my trainer left. Teresa Gonzalez. The baptism where we filled the font up with a hose? Yeah, her. At the zone conference we had Friday, they invited some members to come and let the missionaries practice on them teaching the first lesson. And... she was invited to go! She has been incredibly active this whole time, helping get her family members baptized, and is now the Primary President. It was an incredible feeling to see a convert that was still active, and going strong!!

The next photo is of the baptism that we had. The baptism went really well, the branch president baptized both of them. Their confirmation was a little strange, but I´ll explain that in the email that comes now.

Well, after sending all of those pictures and describing them. You all kind of already know how my week went. Last Pday was really, really fun. We all didn´t feel all the well the next day, but that´s alright. It was worth it. It rained enough that there was mud for the next three or four days. Lots of rain, kind of reminded me of Goya. But yeah. The next day was Tuesday, where we found the spider, took a picture, and then killed it, and I buried it under a rock. Wednesday, our amazing activity. Thursday.... we just went out and tried to find some new investigators and everything because our week was so busy with the baptism and conference and such things. We didn´t have all that much time to be outside finding investigators. Friday, we went to our zone conference. An amazing conference. We talked more about the use of the Book of Mormon in the conversion, and talked alot about the Flood the Earth with the Book of Mormon talk that President Benson gave. Incredible the talk. Then President gave a talk of like an hour and a half about believing in miracles. What exactly is a miracle in the mission (getting people to go to church, and stuff like that) and what we have to do to get the miracles (obedience). He said something that really caught my attention - how can someone who is disobedient then go and get on their knees and ask God to perform a miracle. An ungrateful act President called it. I was also able to see some of the old missionary friends I had had, and of course, my convert!!

Saturday was our baptism. And, I can really describe it, just went really really well. The husband of the woman who got baptised, is already a member (they got married on Friday) gave a powerful testimony about how now he might be able to have an eternal family.
Sunday. Two interesting things happened. The first, the converts didn´t have money to pay the bus ticket to come to the church to get confirmed. So....in the middle of sacrament meeting, me and one of the Elders from the ward left in a taxi to go get them and bring them to get confirmed. Crazy fast the driver went (we did ask him to go quickly, so it was OK) . Then later in the evening we contacted a man who told us not to waste time with him. That he was a rocker, and really involved in rock. That if he goes to hell, he goes happy, and that we should go find someone a little more poor and ignorant to bring to our religion.... Haha poor man. If only he knew.... Oh, I lied, third thing that happened.... Four men... trying to over roast a chicken... who aren´t patient... doesn´t work well we learned yesterday. We eat lunch every Sunday with the zone leaders and we tried that this week, not a success.

I think that´s all for this week. Oh, and mom my Sunday school lesson went really well. We got stuck on the topic of forgiveness. And how there are members who commit sins, and have a time of repentance but other members still treat them like sinners. A delicate topic I didn´t want to get to... but I lost control of the class. I gotta keep working on that.

Anyway, I gotta run now, times up, til next week!!
love you all,
- Matthew