Weekly Letter: August 3-9, 2010

The cambios have come again, and with them come....change. I was in quite the situation last week. Whenever I thought of the cambios, I dreaded the change, but also looked forward to it. It´s hard to explain, I tried to explain it last week, but I think I failed to do so adequately. I would try again this week, but I know I´ll just waste time and energy only to fail again. Oh well. One of the changes that I wasn´t looking forward to was saying good-bye to my District Leader, Elder Steed.

This last week was surreal to see him leave. We had both gone to Alta together, but hadn´t really gotten to know each other very well because of difference in age, but I had known and been friends with his younger brother, Russell, and they look very similar to each other, so I recognized him instantly to be his brother. It was a great experience having him as a district leader these last two transfers. He basically was smiling every moment for those 12 weeks. I bet he even smiles when asleep! So it´s really weird to think that he´s right now on the airplane ride home. But I know that he served honorably and I´m very grateful for the opportunity that I had to get to know him here in the Mission.

But this was only of the changes that came. I´m going to receive another companion here in Plateros. So I get to stay here with the people I knew and got to love these last 3 and a half months....but I lose my companion (well, one of them, Manuel is basically the third Elder). Elder Childers is actually returning to the area he was in before he came to Plateros, but this time as District Leader. There, he is going to complete his mission. So my Stepfather(in the mission) is going to die(in the mission) in Camarones.(it´s a place, but it´s named after a shrimp---yeah, the fish in the ocean. Why? I have no idea. No one does.) [Basically I just used some lingo from the mission which sounds really weird in English, I imagine that it does in Spanish too, but all the elders that I talk to understand what I mean when I use it, so I don´t think it´s so weird. So if any of you don´t understand what I said, just skip that sentence because I was basically repeating myself in Mission lingo.]

So I´m going to receive Elder Gamez here in plateros. Once again, I´m going to have to teach him the area, but it´s okay, at least I´m not senior companion. Right now, I think that would be too much of a headache for me. I guess I haven´t learned all I could from this area, because I´ll be here another 6 weeks. That´s actually okay, what I was hoping for actually, because we were going to have a lot of baptisms this Sunday, but all but one fell through at the last minute.

The only one that got baptized was a member from a less-active family that had been baptized a year before. The bishop had given us this name because the daughter had been baptized a year before, but went to Canada the week after for 6 months without being confirmed. Elder Javier and I had worked hard in finding her, but she had been busy because she was preparing to be married. When she got married, she then went on a honeymoon, but these last two week she had returned again. When we finally had an appointment with her last week we explained that because it had been a long time since her baptism that she had to repeat the ordinance. She accepted the idea pretty easily, since she had already made the decision once. We then asked her when she would be baptized, and she asked if she could this sunday. We were like... "Ummm.....YEAH!" She got interviewed two days latter, and, even though she was a little sick, she came to church and got baptized after the services.

So yeah, I was a little sad that the other 6 baptisms that we had set for that date fell through, but during that one baptism, I forgot everything. I definitely need to work on the other 6 that weren´t able to. The Orea Zavaleta family, had to do a lot of paperwork with the house(which they are to inherit from Uriel´s grandmother who passed away recently), Carolina and Fernanda weren´t able to go because of a family commitment for their father´s birthday, and Guillermo and Socorro couldn´t get interviewed and didn´t go to church. So we had one baptism this week, but we still have a lot of work to do. I wonder how my companion is going to react when I tell him that we had 7 set for baptism this week and only one got baptized. He´s probably going think, "Oh, we have some work to do here." I think I´m still learning patience daily, and I´m learning a lot about the agency of others. We can only do so much, it´s their decision. But we´re going to work hard on having a lot of baptisms the next week....especially if the other family we challenged to baptism this last week follows through on their commitment.

Anyway, time is short. Thank you for the support. Please continue praying for me. I know it would be a mistake to say that I´m completely ready for what will come this cambio, because if I had already learned the lessons, why would I have to experience it again? Pray for me to learn and improve daily.

Cariños,

Elder Blackham