Weekly Letter: April 19-25, 2011

para todos uds:

Okay...I realized that I didn´t tell you guys that last week we had transfers, but they didn´t change either one of us. I´m glad because we´ve been starting to see better success. Yesterday we had three people at Church...which was way cool. Especially since we didn´t even know one of them until he showed up (I think we´re going to need to pass him as a reference, but the thing is nobody in our zone knows where it is where this guy lives!)

However, we had a really great sacrament meeting. The Toluca Stake is going to have pleasure of receiving Elder Oaks here in the Stake Conference...and the members are going crazy about an apostle coming here for the first time in the history of the church in Toluca. So the speaker from the stake high council spoke today about what it meant to have an apostle come here in Toluca. We were pretty stoked because I think it helped Miguel and Guadalupe see that what we were teaching about the Restoration is true!

Miguel actually had a really excellent day in Church yesterday. Guadalupe had to go after Sacrament meeting because she needed to visit family, but I think she enjoyed it too. However, Miguel, I think invited himself to baptism yesterday. We had planned to do it yesterday in an appointment after church, but he told us that he had to leave to visit family in the afternoon...so we set an appointment Wednesday...and we´re going to invite him in that appointment to be baptized this Sunday. But yeah, he totally understood everything in church and was really excited afterward...and we were too!

Leaving Church, we then went to an appointment we had made knocking on doors. The family that we were going to eat with changed the time of the food appointment, so we had 20 minutes to talk with them. It´s a couple that received us really well. When we talked about baptism, they understood really well the characteristics of a valid baptism. Actually the husband said afterward "I think I will need to be baptized again...because my baptism wasn´t like that!"(that was when I looked at my companion and said "Today is going to be a good day"). Literally, I felt like I couldn´t keep myself from smiling the whole day. Even when we knocked on the door of a Jehovah´s Witness who wanted to Bible bash, I think was still smiling...which I think frustrated him.

Basically, this week, we have been able to see that the fruits of our labors are starting to emerge. We also taught a great lesson with Enrique Guerra, who was going to go to church this week, but couldn´t (just like last week) because of work. We taught the Word of Wisdom. At first he was asking a whole bunch of "whys," but at the end of the lesson he started to calm down and actually was smiling for the last ten minutes of the lesson. When we asked him if he would obey this commandment, he smiled, and said "Yes, and I´ll tell you why I´ll do it on Saturday." (He´s going invite us to eat some "pambazos" a Toluqueño specialty. My companion knows what they are, but hasn´t tried them. He tried something similar in Guadalajara, but Enrique says that these are better here.) Earlier this past week we also invited him to get baptized, and he accepted....but he didn´t go to church.

Anyway, I am really grateful that we are again having the success that we want. The only thing is that we have to maintain the rhythm of our work here, so that we don´t have a whole bunch of baptisms and then a fallout afterward. However, I think Elder Rosales and I have learned how to work well with this rhythm, and we´re loving it!

Thanks for the prayers and the support. We will need more of your prayers this week as well! I feel like the Lord is preparing this Land of Toluca in order to receive one of his Twelve Apostles in four weeks. Just keep praying for us!

Cariños,

Elder Blackham