Weekly Letter: October 12-18, 2010

I'm going to write really fast. I wish I could write with less pressure, but we've got to be in an appointment with some investigators at 6:00 and we have to go to the other side of our area in Almoloya by Colinas del Sol. So, I hope that you can excuse the grammatic and spelling errors that may appear in this letter....that is, if my brother doesn't edit them out.

We had a pretty good week this week. Elder Chavez and I are starting to figure each other out a little bit. We are starting to figure out what annoys the other, and the things we should do (or not do) when we're around each other. Yeah, being with a person for 24 hours a day is a little difficult, but we're both learning a lot, and not just about ourselves but from other people in the ward.

We've got a great ward where many returned missionaries see our efforts and are willing to give us advice. Unfortunately, I'm sorry to say that some of them did not have the same confidence with some of the past missionaries in our area. So getting references from them is a little harder because a lot of them say they want us to clean up after the work of the other missionaries. Not all of them think like that, but sometimes it is discouraging when you know they have people in mind to receive the gospel.

So that's one our challenges. However, we still manage and deal with it well. Sometimes we come home after a long day, and realize that we had only one lesson with an investigator and the rest of the appointments with less-active members or fell through. So, we try to bear things up and keep going. We feel like we're working hard and putting in our effort, but sometimes it feels like the fruits just don't want to come. I try to think that it's an opportunity to find more people, or to learn how better to work effectively in a given area of the ward where we're working.

That all said, it really does make your heart swell to see that after all the work that week, that some fruits finally came. Saturday, we had a very successful Family night with a less active family in the ward, who invited three neighbors to it. At first the neighbors seemed to think that we were aliens or something by the way they looked at us(or rather, the way they avoided eye-contact with us), but after the message and the film (Testaments), everyone contributed to the discussion, and we set appointments with everyone of the neighbors.

Even though the neighbors weren't able to come, Javier and Rocio, who were challenged the week before to baptism, did! We actually got up at 5:00 Sunday morning to travel to Almoloya in order to bring them all the way back to the Chapel in Centro at 9:00. We got there at 8:45....and no one was there but us, the chapel wasn't even open!(Mormon Standard Time in Mexico is a beast!) Oh well, it was still good.

Also, Carlos was able to come. All his in-laws and children are baptized members of the church, and he really likes it and wants to be baptized.....but his mother is a Jehovah's Witness, and although he readily admits that he does not like what they teach, he doesn't want to go against his mother that gave him life. So for all these years(since 2001) he's been talking to the missionaries, and he likes it a lot, but he's always kind of been in a limbo for that reason. However, he has said that he would like Elder Chavez and I to be the ones that baptized him, and he says he wants to get baptized in December, in order to give him time to think about how to break the news to his mother.

Anyway, he also came to church and really liked it. So the Sunday really helped boost our hopes. I just hope that we can keep helping them along in this path. (actually the Family night is with Javier and Rocio, and we're planning on teaching some commandments and setting an appointment with the District Leader for an interview). So yeah, we have plenty of work to do and little time to do it. I can't believe how fast this change has gone, we're already in the second-to-last week of the change. The next changes will be the 1st of november. Literally, this change(as well as October) has been nothing but a blur!

So yeah, that's my week in a nutshell. Thank you for the support, and keep praying for me. The work goes on in Toluca Centro.

Cariños,

Elder Blackham