I am still with Elder Villalobos, and
since tomorrow is transfers/my training being over, I found out today that I
will at least be with him through the end of the year. Ricardo is sharing
the gospel at work and with his family, and they are starting to have their
hearts softened enough to listen to us. He is more than excited to be
baptized. He paid tithing (even though he's not supposed to) this week
and grabbed enough envelopes to last until the end of the year. We also
recommitted Victor (the blind dude) for the 15th of december. His mom had
whisked him off to Mexico for 2 weeks without warning and so he wasn't able to
tell us and our impression was that he had literally dropped off the face of
the earth. He is progressing (at his own pace) and had already listened
to most of the book of Alma. He got stuck in 2 nefi because he didn't
understand anything and then we told him to listen to alma 32 and he is almost
done with the war chapters now. We assigned him the story of Alma the
youngers conversion and he seemed excited to listen to it. Also, call
Megen and tell her I got her package, and thank her for me. I would have
written back, but I threw away the packaging and forgot to write down the
address. Tell her her fried chicken recipe was really good too. The
battalion has a teaching room and every missionary's goal is to take an
investigator there. We have only been once, but we are going tomorrow.
Not to brag, but we are getting
some serious work done in our branch right now. Our mission president is
very much aware of the changes that we have made in the past 3 months in our
branch, and, like you said, the members are starting to trust us. Our
branch president, who used to hate the missionaries, had us over for dinner
last week and is having us over for thanksgiving as well. His wife served
her mission in Costa Rica. We are doing our best to improve the ward
council, which is especially hard considering that we do have to respect the
organization. Part of what we have done is just stop showing up, because
we were losing almost all of our Tuesday nights to the meeting and
accomplishing nothing with the work. 99% of the meetings were 2 hours of
talking about one member who is kind of sick or sad or something and then never
actually getting anything done about it, and then none of the real issues (i.e.
missionary work, reactivation, getting people to the temple, etc. etc. etc.)
They wanted us to be there at every meeting, especially because we practically
run the branch at times, and then they would give us about 2 minutes every 3
weeks to essentially mention the names of our investigators, what they needed,
attempt to get people to assign things for them, and then jack squat got
done. We have been pushing really hard on the mission leader to actually
do his calling even though he has asked to be released and he is finally
starting to pick up a lot of the slack. We do a lot of work with less
actives, especially because they are almost always surrounded by non-members that
we can teach. The only issue with that is that the focus 15 or 5 or whatever it
is never gets used. The list constantly changes, and they constantly ask
us to visit people who aren't on it, and so our efforts end up being spread out
and not accomplish anything. However, as my mission president says, there are
very few situations that you can't baptize your way out of, and that's what
we're working on. If I have things my way, we should have 4 by the end of
the year. We only have 2 with a date, but there are a couple more that I
think that could do it.
