Haha I feel really old! We had a another great week, and the best was that I got a sweet present for my birthday...we baptized Griselda!!! Best birthday present ever! Griselda is really really special. She was a reference from a hermano and does everything on her own. She shows up to church and reads alot from the Book of Mormon without us having to ask her. We did the baptism at 8 in the morning on saturday, it was really early but a ton of members showed up and it was really spiritual. Griselda had a bunch of stuff to do this weekend but she was super ready to get baptized, so we had the baptismal service at 8 in the morning. She lives in a little town called Yanga, where we have the family group because it is too small to be a branch. She is going to be a strong member of the church, she has a lot of faith in her Heavenly Father and is willing to do what he asks of her.
This birthday was really really special. I woke up and didn´t even remember until I changed the Argyle Sweater calender that mom sent me and thought, hey, I turn 20 today! It rained for 5 hours straight that day and we were walking in the rain alot, we got home absolutely soaked to the bone and freezing cold, but I was just happy as could be because we had a pretty good day and I dunno, I was just happy to be a missionary on my birthday. :) I thanked my Heavenly Father for letting me grow up in an amazing family with good parents so I had the chance to serve a mission.
So mom, the truth is I don´t really know what´s wrong with the sentences that I wrote...the english is getting worse and worse, haha. The other day we went to do an interview and while we were walking to the house with two other Elders from our district, this big group came up to us, like 10 from mexico with one american lady leading the pack. They came up to us and started speaking to us in English, and the american lady told us that she was their teacher and they were learning English. They spoke pretty good, but I was finding it really really hard to talk to the lady in English, (Elder Westhoff too, he´s from St. George.) Haha we had a fun converstion with all of them, talking about what we do as misionaries and the lady was telling us that it was good for her students to hear native speakers, so we talked to them all for a while. But we are so used to talking about the gospel in spanish, that we almost having to translate everything from spanish back to english, haha it was great. The best part was that Elder Westhoff wrote down a bunch of the adresses and is going to try to visit all of them.
So there is a new program that President Treviño has explained to the members where they are going to give us 12 references every week. So this week in church the bishop gave us an hour after sacrament meeting and we taught the members how to share pamphlets with their friends and then set up an apointment when they can bring us to talk to their friends. My companion and I showed them good example and bad examples, and the members were laughing and really into everything. Everyone was super excited and we had them do a couple of practices, and then at the end we did an activity to get references and got like 15. And in Yanga during the week, the ward organized a movie night and we watched the Testaments, and talked about how Jesus came to America. We had 10 people come who weren´t members, (a bunch of them are super interested in the church) and we wrote down their directions and everything so we are going to visit them all this week. I am super excited because we have a lot of work to do and it is all going to be through the members.
This week we are going to baptized Francisco and Jorgina. They are living together but aren´t married, so we are going to help them get married this week and do the baptism afterwards. Francisco has cancer and is going through treatments. They are really special and want to get married in the temple a year after their baptism. We are praying and fasting alot that everything can work out for them this week, and that Francisco can respond well to all his treatments and everything. They will apreciate all the prayers that you can sen them this week!!
This week we are going to have a zone conference with president and his wife, we are all really excited for that! The pictures are of the baptism and some pictures that we took after a counsel of leaders that we had sunday after church. We have a crazy group of misioneries in the zone as you can tell, its really fun here in this area.
I love you all sooooo much!! thank you for the birthday wishes and for your prayers!!!
Mucho amor,
Elder Eastmond
No comments:
Post a Comment