May 16, 2011

Dear Family,

This week went super good. It was also super hectic. First of all, José is doing well. For the last two weeks we’ve been meeting with him every other day to pump him up for his baptism. He was still having problems with dropping alcohol, so we fasted with him on Sunday to help him go cold turkey. Hopefully he makes it. If he passes his interview tomorrow he can get baptized this week. If not, we’ll have to put it off until he is able to stop drinking. Pray for him. He’s super excited and prepared for his baptism, he just needs to go over this last hurdle to make it.

So we’ve been preparing to do a big missionary fireside, focused on member missionary work. We got a big box of copies of the Book of Mormon and our ward mission leader made a whole ton of banana bread and... 7 people showed up. Yeah, kinda a bummer, especially it just happened to fall right when we were fasting so we couldn’t even load up on the bread. But, it went well anyway and we at least got 7 members of the ward pumped up about missionary work. By small and simple things....

Those awesome new investigators we found last week are doing well. As a rule with new investigators we usually try making the return appointment within the first few days after the contact or first lesson. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get a hold of one, and the other is moving to Buenos Aires next week, so... gotta keep on working :) This week we had a pretty funny story about finding a new family, though. One night we were knocking doors and a 14 year old boy answered and said his mom wasn’t home, but would be the next day. The next day we went back and his older brother (15) answered the door. We told the older brother that we were missionaries and that the younger brother had said we should come back. The older brother let us in without protest and we walked up into the house. We walked into the living room and the mom and the sister walked in with super surprised expressions on their faces, like "what are these two random guys doing in our house?". The mom however said, "you guys are Mormons, right? Have a seat!" (we like to hear that) and they treated us super well and even fed us dinner. Haha, we couldn’t keep laughing about how randomly we got into the house, but how nice they were to let us stay and give us food. We have a return appointment to teach them this Friday, hopefully it goes well. They seem like such a perfect family ready for the gospel.

Well, that’s about it for this week. Love you all tons! The church is true!

-Elder Spencer