Wow! What happened? It´s Monday again, and here I am! I can´t believe how fast this week went. Already, I´m in the third week of this transfer....which means I´m already halfway done. It certainly doesn´t feel like that at all! I realized that I´m going to complete my fourth month in the mission this week! To me, that´s just crazy! But, at the same time, when I allow myself to think about the day I entered the MTC, it feels like I was a different person.
As far as this week went, I felt pretty good by the end of it....(mostly because we had two investigators come to church, one with her family!) We really worked hard on getting these people to go to church. It was difficult because one of them, Irene, works at home and was swamped with her work the last two weeks. Each time, we committed her to go to church, and she said she would, but she wasn't able to because of her work. When we passed by, we thought we were going to have to teach about keeping the Sabbath day, but she told us already that she felt bad that she worked on the Lord´s day, and she would work harder the next week. Unfortunately, that next week the same thing happened. This last week, as a companionship, Elder Javier and I prayed and fasted to know what we could do. We promised her that this week she could finish her work early, the Saturday, in order to worship appropriately that Sunday. After promising this, she nodded solemnly and promised us she would come this Sunday.......which she did!
What´s even better is that she was able to talk with the bishop personally and make quite a few friends in the Relief society. After the meetings, the bishop talked to us privately and told us that he felt Irene was ready to be baptized. I think we already knew that as companionship before, but hearing the bishop say that really confirmed that. We have an appointment with her tomorrow, and we´re going to challenge her to be baptized! What a tender mercy it was to find her!
The other investigator, Gabriela Orea, was also able to attend all of the meetings this Sunday. This was great because she sometimes works Sundays and so we had been preparing her to go to the chapel for a couple weeks with her family. Her husband had to stay with his grandmother, who is ill, although he also wanted to go, but both of her young children were able to go! In fact, she told before Sunday School started that her children actually asked her to allow them to go with her to church! They´re really small, the oldest is six, and the other is only two, but both of them are learning already from the parents, a lot of what we´ve taught them. Hermana Orea also told me, if I understood her right (it seemed almost too good to be true) that she was going to start asking all the Sundays off of work! The only struggle both she and her husband have is the Word of Wisdom. But we taught them earlier this week about the word of wisdom, we helped them make a some goals for the next appointment on Friday on how many cigarettes they were going to smoke....both of them were able lower the amount of cigarettes this week and meet that goal! However, they both told us that it was difficult and that they felt something was lacking. Luckily we have a brother from the church who worked with addicts as his career coming to our stake to give a discourse about how to overcome these addictions.
Well, it´s already late. This P-day was quite the busy day. My companion had to go to the hospital to get an eye infection checked out. We arrived about 7 in the morning, and we didn´t get back home until about 4:30 in the afternoon. By that time, it was all we could do to eat something really quick, grab our stuff and head to the district meeting in Mixcoac at 6:00 (which we were still late for). After being up since about 5:00 this morning I´m dead tired, so I´m going to call it a day and head to bed, in order to be refreshed for this next week of missionary work!
Love you all, thank you so much for your prayers and support. It really does help. Please continue praying for my behalf, and I will update you all next week.
Con Amor,
Elder Blackham
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