Weekly Letter: December 6-12, 2011

para mi familia:

Alright so first of all...I don´t know if you heard about the earthquake in Mexico.....it was SWEET!!! It was 6.8 on the ricter´s scale, but the epicenter was in Zumpango, Guerrrero, which is somewhat far away...so here it was about a minute in which things were shaking. I was actually talking on the phone at the time and suddenly I felt like I got dizzy. We were in the street though, so we couldn´t see anything happening, but the zone leaders were telling me that it was earthquaking....and I was like What!? I then looked around and saw this parked car shaking like crazy, and I was like "Wow! I´m in an earthquake!" but it only lasted a minute here.

Then for Christmas.... We will also only have a sacramental service on the 25th at 9:00 (only it would be an hour in difference, but I forget if it´s an hour earlier or later than you guys....you guys figure it out.)

Well, now to business. This week was way fun...in that we are going to leave a lot of investigators that we have. They just seem to not progress, and so we are going to be exercising the faith in what Elder Johnson said and simply leave them so that we can get to the chosen investigators. Some of them are really cool and have accepted baptism...but they just don´t want to progress...and we are just wasting time with them because while we keep going to their house they are content. It is going to be hard to leave many of them behind, but looking at the success that we´ve had in finding cool investigators, I feel that the Lord has been trying prepare us for this. He knows that I have a hard time leaving investigators, especially if there isn´t anybody to replace them with, so this is a good thing. We had 6 investigators in church this week, and they all loved it. 3 had already gone, and just have to get the marriage worked out so that one couple and the wife of another couple can be baptized. The other three are also needing some rings so they can be baptized.... speaking of which, I wonder if we will still be able to get people married in these next weeks...I hope the Lawyer that helps us out doesn´t bail on us these weeks...because we want a WHITE Christmas....as in baptizing, snow does not exist here. (actually, I explained what icicles were to a member and she understood what I was talking about because she saw them in photos or movies, but neither she, her husband, her mom, nor anybody else knows what they´re called!)

We are really focusing on getting the ward animated about some of the people we are teaching. We are working with a few references that they gave us, and they look like they could be a lot of work to get them progress in comparison to some of the investigators that we´ve been finding, but I think it will be worth the effort if we can show the ward that their efforts to give references will be valued by the missionaries...and so we will have MORE references.

So our focus these weeks will be to get a lot of inactives or new members and investigators to the ward Christmas party, and hopefully work to get some of the more excited members to help us out in visiting them. We´ve been kind of waiting for something to happen in the ward, but I realize that while we are waiting for these things to happen nothing will happen.

Well I got to go now. Talk to you next week about Christmas.

Love you all

cariños,

Elder Blackham