July 20, 2015 Letter

This week was awesome. I definitely felt like that whole fresh start thing that I describe in my last email got put into practice. It wasn't a perfect week, but I feel like, overall, it was really good. We working a lot with the 15 year old Dominican girl that I told you about. She now has a baptismal date for September and loves everything we teach her.  So we had her pick her own date and that's what she chose! She's awesome. I'll keep you updated on her. She loves the a Book of Mormon so much and yesterday, thanks to the help of our awesome Young Women's president, Natalia, she started working on her personal progress. And she LOVES it. She's also reading for the strength of youth and was so excited about the section of dressing appropriately. She was just going on and on about how finally somebody understands that you shouldn't flaunt what you've got and such... It was cute. Oh, and she also told us, after our law of chastity lesson, that she definitely wants to marry a Mormon boy. We told her about BYU and how there are thousands of Mormon boys there, and you should have seen her eyes light up... It was so cute. We love her a lot and we're excited about her. 

We also had this great find this week- F. He's Spanish, about 35 years old, and works as a nurse. He worked with this woman awhile back who was living in the old folks home where he works. The missionaries would go and visit her and bring her the sacrament until she died a  little while later (she was a member of the church). The missionaries never talked to him, but he was, at that time, starting to get disilliusioned with the Catholic Church and he was really impressed with the way that the missionaries treated this poor little old woman. With their quiet example, he decided to look up on the Church online and read through the whole website. He then got the address of the church and stopped by one morning when we happened to be there for a lesson. He rang on the doorbell and asked if he could meet with us another day. We wrote down his number and gave him our card, and he called us 2 hours later! It was so cool. So we've now met with him twice. Our first lesson was just answering his questions, and in our second, we were trying to help him understand more our purpose as missionaries and we asked him what his end goal in meeting us was. This is before we've brought up baptism at all, seeing as we were going to invite him after asking that question. His response was- "so I'll keep meeting with you, get all my questions answered, go to church, read the book, feel it in my heart, and then if I like everything, I'll get baptized." It was amazing. We're excited about him as well. 

We spent some good time on the street and we found a really cool guy yesterday. We ended up talking to him for about an hour- half of my face is sunburnt, as a result. He is a young Spaniard and has all the right questions. So I'm excited for him!! The Lord is blessing us tremendously and I feel so happy to be here. 

Also, we planned and threw a wildly successful branch activity on Saturday night. It was a culture activity. Everyone brought a dish from their country and we had some people do dances and a few members did a presentation on family history. It was so much fun and SO  many people came. We were blown away. My compa and I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and brownies, and the elders made corndogs. People thought the sandwiches were weird, but you would not believe their reaction to the corndogs and the brownies. They were in Heaven. A few members invited friends and we were able to get to know them better. It was really good. It was only through Heavnely fathers help that it went so well- it reminds me of a quote I found the other day by the Prophet. He said- "I never cease to be amazed by how the Lord can motivate and direct the length and breadth of His kingdom and yet have time to provide inspiration concerning one individual--or one cultural celebration or one Jumbotron. The fact that He can, that He does, is a testimony to me." It was super super cool.

Culture NIght-We dressed as Americans