Weekly Letter: March 8-14, 2011

para todos uds:

Another first week of a change. I really enjoyed it. We worked really hard this week, unfortunately, we were not able to have as many fruits this week as the last week. Right now we have to refill the tank. The last few weeks with Elder Perez, we really focused ourselves in sending him out with that little miracle. So we baptized the majority of our really good investigators, but we have already begun to find people here that can be good investigators. However, I think we are going to work hard to have a more balanced focus this week.

Some of my other companions have said that they didn´t come here to knock on doors or contact people in the street, they came to baptize. As such, we always worked by referrals from members. I have gained a testimony of the effectiveness of this way of working, but I also have a testimony that if the members do not feel that we are working, they are not going to give us referrals. This week, we worked a little bit too much on our own, and it wasn't effective. We did not have many fruits, and with new responsibilities that I now have, I realize that I can´t simply work hard, but effectively to have fruits.

I´m the first companion of Elder Rosales, and he came to work. I´m so grateful for that because, it really does help the work progress. However, I was able to note that even with that seeming infallible energy, after a week of work relying only on knocking on doors and contacting people, he seemed to get tired and a little discouraged. This impedes the work. So I´ve learned my lesson. So I´m hoping the members all got excited by the baptisms we´ve been having and give us references. However, we cannot neglect our own efforts either, because that´s a really important part of our work...in fact all the 6 baptisms that Elder Perez and I had this last change came from knocking on doors and contacts by other companions. So there are those people waiting for us to be able to accept the gospel, waiting to be found. But we have to work with the balance between the two.

So we will see if this proves to be key to success in the mission. I´ve been struggling in finding this balance, but I think I´ve realized how important it is, and so we will focus more on developing this balance. Please pray for us that we may have success in our efforts this week!

Well, time is short, so I´ll finish just saying thanks for everything. Keep praying for us so that we can keep working and have success in it.

Cariños,

Elder Blackham