March 5, 2013

  This week we came one short of my record of lessons for a week (22 and 23) and we have been hitting part-member families really hard.  Elder Villalobos and I were never able to get anywhere with part-member families, but all of the investigators we have added the past few weeks have been from part-member families.  Things are fairly difficult in that my companion speaks nearly unintelligible Spanish and he goes home in June, but I am being a tough taskmaster and he is starting to learn more.  Last night we had a really good lesson and he started chattering in spanish about the best I've ever heard him speak.  The spirit really helps sometimes.  Elder Gay from the 70 gave us a surprise visit this week, and he gave a phenomenal talk on how to involve members more in missionary work.  He talked about when he did that as a mission president and they split the mission twice.  On his mission, he also nearly single-handedly changed how missionary work was done in Spain.  Also, his grandmother received a personal visit from Jesus Christ right before she died.  It was a crazy good talk.  Also, the missionary dept just changed the policy on email for missionaries, and we are allowed to write friends now (that's why I'm writing so late).  More info on our area-- one of the assistants came up to us yesterday and putting a third companionship in the branch is a strong possibility with the huge surge and the kind of numbers that we have been putting up.  We just need to get some baptisms behind it. 

We also got to teach victor this week (we had only seen him once in the past two months).  We got on the phone with him on thursday, and cancelled an appt so that we could go see him that same night.  We then taught him on friday and took him to church on sunday.  we were supposed to see him last night but he had to cancel, so we're seeing him in a few minutes.  Because he has made it to church enough times now, we're gonna commit him to pay tithing tonight and schedule a baptismal interview and see if we can't get him baptized this weekend.  It's a huge stretch, but we can make it happen.  As far as pollito/my companion goes, we are getting along pretty well.  He does a lot of really weird stuff, but it's mostly funny.  There are still times where I have to stop myself from saying "what on earth are you doing?" but he means well so I have no problem with it.  He has been out 21 months, so now he is already thinking about going home and always asks me for advice about how he should get himself married.  I've let him know my thoughts about marriage, which is a nice way of emphasizing on staying focused on finding, teaching, baptizing, restoring the gospel, preaching it, gathering the house of israel, reactivating, fulfilling prophecy, and everything else we have to do.  Have a good week!