November 29, 2010

Dear Family,

This week went super well. One of the highlights was finding an awesome investigator we have. His name is Freddy. We were walking down the street one day when a drunk man from the side of the road called out to us. Here that's pretty normal, and we usually ignore them and continue on our way to avoid safety issues. My companion, however, decided to go talk to him and I followed him pretty skeptically. Freddy then told us how he was separated from his wife and 6 kids by a horrible alcohol addiction. We started teaching him. We told him about how important his family was and convinced him that with the help of God he would be able to drop the addiction. We left him the story of Enos to read and committed him to stop cold turkey with alcohol. We knelt down in a circle and he gave his first prayer. The spirit was really strong. We came back the next day and he had managed to make it a day without drinking. He loved the story and showed it to his wife and kids and had them read it. We came back each day of the week to check up on his goals to stop drinking. On the weekend, Saturday night, he told us that it was the first weekend he had spent sober in a very long time and how happy he was and how great he felt. He was so glad he had spent the whole day working on building a house for his family in stead of drinking as normal. He is progressing super fast and doing great. We're going to visit him tonight to keep teaching him and see how he's doing.

Other great news, I talked with my old companion Elder Staker and his new ward is in the same stake as our old area. They had a stake conference and he was able to see several of the people we had worked with. Remember Alejandra, whose husband was an inactive and her and her daughter were baptized? They are now preparing to go to the temple in a year!! Her husband still has some problems with alcohol, but he is now completely active and the family is progressing great. How cool is that!!?! Elder Staker also told me that another investigator we had worked hard with, but that was progressing really slow, finally chose her own baptismal date for the end of December! Also, the missionaries had invited her to see a baptism (of Veronica's daughter), and it turns out that she and Veronica are really good friends, so she's already got a familiar face in church! What a blessing to see the people I taught progress in the gospel! That's really what makes it all worth the while.

Anyway, other than that, a normal week. I accidentally forgot about Thanksgiving, but celebrated it the day after with the only other American in my district by eating PB and J sandwiches. We decided that that was a pretty good substitute for turkey as far as traditional American foods are concerned. Anyway, love you all tons. This week I found an excellent quote by Elder Scott that stuck with me and I've been thinking about it all the time: "We become what we want to be, by constantly being what we want to become every day". Love you all, church is true!

Elder Spencer