Weekly Letter: February 15-21, 2011

This week was a good week. I felt like we worked a lot harder and had some more fruits this week. Including a baptism! It wasn´t an easy week, but it was a good one. I really like working with Elder Perez. He is the missionary with the most time in the mission that I have had as a companion, but he has a lot of desires to work. He tells me that he wasn´t always like that, but that he wants to end well. He already had a great last change with lots of miracles that he and Elder Sanders experienced. And now, the work has begun to pick up the pace.

Already, I have gotten to know well the area and the investigators. I feel confident in my orientation of the area (it helps that Toluca Centro is really close by.) I also feel more or less confident in where everything is in the Zone, which is good, because sometimes we have to go to other areas for Baptismal interviews. So, I´m getting there! I am seriously really excited about this area because we´ve got some great people in teaching right now. We´ve been trying to find more new investigators, and many are good, but because we have some awesome investigators, sometimes we don´t have as much time to find new investigators.

This week we were able to baptize Maria Elena. From the start when Sanders and Perez started teaching, she said that she wanted to be baptized. When I got to know her, she had already gone to church once and wanted to get baptized. Well, yesterday, she was baptized after the services. She was at first hesitant, because she has had problems with her husband and wanted to get everything settled before her baptism. We told her that if she got baptized and remained true to her covenants that her husband would eventually notice the change and would begin to want that change in her life. We met her husband this week too. He seems a little reserved, but he likes listening to us too. I think his challenge is going to be his mother who is really Catholic and doesn´t want him to change.

Also we had another investigator accept the invitation to be baptized. But, because mission rules are that they have to go two times to church before they can be baptized, we put the date for this following Sunday, hoping that she would go to church this week.....and she came! Unfortunately, we were busy getting the font ready for Maria Elena´s baptism before the services, so that when Amalia arrived, she almost left when she didn´t see us. But a brother and sister in the ward were quick to catch her and invited her so warmly that she accepted and sat in the Sacrament meeting. When we got everything ready and the font was filling up, we were panicked because we hadn´t received a call from Amalia or anything, but Elder Perez said "Let´s check if she´s in the Sacrament meeting" and sure enough, there she was, smiling.

Amalia has an interesting story.Her daughters were baptized five years ago, but when both of them moved in with their husbands, they went inactive. (The husband of one of the daughters, Marco Antonio also wants to be baptized, but he and Abigail have to get married by civil law before he can get baptized....it´s complicated, but that´s the situation). Amalia didn´t have any interest in the church at that time, and actually told the missionaries that she would be Catholic until she died. However, in a matter of years, she has changed so much. She actually has us come over frequently to teach her neighbor Carolina, and when we teach, she testifies that this is the true church...she´s not even baptized and she already is teaching and testifying to her friends and neighbors!

So yeah, we have a date for this next Sunday that she will get baptized. So we´re going to work hard to encourage the entire family...including Marco Antonio...to attend, so that it can be something to get the daughters excited to go to church again, and something to encourage Marco Antonio to get married so he can be baptized too!

Wow, there is very little time to write now, and I didn´t even mention the Piña Family, which is also in scopes to be baptized in two weeks. (They want to be baptized already, but the dad hasn´t been able to go to church because of his work these last few weeks on Sunday.) But I guess I´ll talk more about everybody else this next week.

Keep praying for me! We´re feeling pretty good about how things are going here, but we need to improve in finding new people this week! Thanks for everything and the support you give us!

Cariños,

Elder Blackham