Week 85

Dear Family,

I´m basically gonna send you guys a modified letter of what I sent to my president,

I have to say that this has been one of the most gratifying weeks of my mission. It was a week of pure success. We were able to baptise Carolina, who has been an investigator since the first day of the transfer. Jucuapa were able to baptise 3 people, bringing the zone to a total of 10 baptisms, with every area baptising in the month of september. The Lord has really blessed me in my mission. There have been hard time, discouraging time, and times where I just worked because thats what God wants me to do, even though I didn´t have success, but also I feel I have made a difference in the lives of many people. I was brought to rememberance this week how much the lord has helped me meet the personal goals that I have set for myself. In the MTC I remember putting a couple goals for myself, like baptising my first month in the mission, and baptising every month of my mission, and being 100% obedient. I havent been 100% obedient my whole mission, and I have gone several months without baptising, but I remember the feeling that I had when we had a baptism my 4th week in the mission. When I was with Elder Membreño I shared that story with him, and he told me about when he set himself a lot of goals while he was in La union, almost all of which were fullfiled. That inspired me to set goals for the last 6 months of my mission. I put pretty high goals for six months, but now I can see that what has been happening this week is God trying to help me reach my goals.

At the present time we have about 4 families that I feel will get baptised here. It all has happened basically like a miracle. After our meeting with Elder Martino we had a district leader council and we put some goals for how we are going to achieve the visions that we set in the zone leader council. We developed a new Chart to work with the 5 less active families in our branch, and we made copies for every area in the zone, and trained them how to use it. We are going to have district mission corelation soon to share it with the district president, and every area is going to present it in branch council to find the focus 5 families that they will teach. We decided that we are going to have a new indicator in the zone called LPEF or lecciones para encontrar familias, which basically is just if we see a couple in the streets we are obligated to talk to them.

From the LPEF in the street we found an amazingly humble family this week, who are starting to progress rapidly. We did a very intensive investigation of the area books that we have and picked out several old investigators who we want to contact ( people that had gone to church several times but never got baptised ), from that list we are currently teaching 1 family, with appointments to visit 2 more famlies this week who we have contacted. I also asked elder Sien who was in the area of Poniente if he remembered any investigators from Poniente that he believes would have gotten baptised but didnt, and from that we have found a mother with 3 children of baptismal age and above. We have an appointment with her for tomorrow. We recieved a member reference of an inactive who got recently married who we have been teaching for 3 weeks, and finally for the revelation and wisdom of an active mother-in-law the couple went to church yesterday. Elder Oliva also remembered a family that he had found with Elder Del Mercado last change but never went to teach, they all went to church yesterday as a family, and they liked it a lot. Something that is helping us is that Elder Martino inspired us to be more dynamic, and try out new teaching styles, with hands-on-examples, and more interaction. We plan out our lessons every day to get the maximum teaching effect, and it is helping a lot. Also the members have taken a new interest in helping us, and they are almost all offering to go out to visit with us, and because we are now keeping a fairly full agenda we have been able to actually set up appointments to bring members, some of which have been extremely effective. (like yesterday when the sister we brought turned out to be a direct cousin of our head of family investigator.)

I feel like this is the first time in my mission when we are truly setting an area up for a lot of success. I strongly believe that in this area where will be between 10 and 20 baptisms in the next two changes. The Lord is helping us a lot.

I hope all is going weel out in California and Taiwan. We getting into the heat a little bit here, but thats cool.
I only have 3 transfers left :(

Anyways, I feel that the Lord wants me to finish my mission strong, and I pray to got that I will be able to stay in this area to see these families be baptised.