Weekly Letter: November 23-29, 2010

I think I´m going to have to write a little more news this week, because a lot has happened, and I didn´t write anything last week. This transfer from working in Almoloya all the time to working more in the Centro of Toluca has been hard and sometimes discouraging. However, I think we are starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Elder Mendoza and I basically decided early on that we were going to drop the investigators we had in the Centro. Nobody was progressing, they had been in teaching for over a year, and our appointments kept on falling through. It was truly a trying experience to decide to leave all of them, I hope they have a future chance to accept what we´ve been teaching them.

Meanwhile, we have been focusing a lot on getting references, and finding new investigators. There is an older Brother in the ward here that is basically looking to give us another reference....and some of his family is inactive. We have been working a lot with him and his family, and we have been able to find some prospective investigators thanks to his help. We´ve also been witnesses to daily miracles, where people start contacting us in the street, asking us if we can go to their home....which never happens normally.

We are far from out of the woods. We realized that we spent a lot of time with inactive members this week and almost didn´t teach investigators....or not as much as we could have. I´ve realized that we can´t be focusing on how much time we have until the next appointment. We have to be busy no matter what. Many times, when I´m looking at the clock all the time, I start looking for things we can do with that time. However, we many times end up spending 40 minutes doing what we could have done in 15, just to spend more time. That isn´t work, we feel better because we´re talking to people, but that isn´t the work that the Lord wants us to do.

We had a Seventy visit us on Saturday, Elder De Hoyos told us basically that. He gave us an example of what we can do. One companion is like "It´s 12:30, and our next appointment is at 1:00, what members live around here?" the other is like "Oh! Hermano So-and-so," they go to the appointment and members commit to go to church that Sunday. They offer something to eat(like the members always do), and they decline for another ocasion, saying they have work to do. They leave the house at 12:40, and one elder is like "We still have 20 minutes before the appointment," and the other responds "yeah, but they don't have to know that. Let´s see if we can do some contacts before the appointment."

The work is like that. We have to keep busy if we want to be blessed. Like the Lord said we have to be "anxiously engaged in a good cause." This week, we were always in engaged in a good cause, but we were far from anxious. However, this week with the investigators we have, we have a better head start than the other week, and I think we can work harder on being anxiously engaged in this work, and have more fruits this week.

Well, I´m out of time, I was going to write more specifics about some investigators that we had, but I didn´t get the chance. However, we've already challenged a family to be baptized, they've accepted, but we just have to encourage the mother to get baptized. She said that in January she would be baptized, but then her son looked at her and said "Mom, I thought we were going to get baptized sooner than that!" We´ll see if we can get to the temple this Saturday, it´s a little more complicated now that we´re in Toluca, but we´re going to see what we can do. But I know that that can help them get excited to be baptized!

Well, I got to go!

Cariños,

Elder Blackham