July 11, 2011

Dear Family,

Well this week was great! Great, but tiring. We have lots of investigators that are almost progressing well. Almost. Translation, we have been working a lot, visiting them, committing them, following up, making arrangements for people to walk with them to church, recommitting, etc. The good news is that we have about 5 people committed firmly to get baptized this and next month. The bad news is that it is pulling teeth to get them to come to church. Oh well, salvation isn’t a cheap experience.

One especially cool experience we had. Remember Fernando, our awesome 78-year old investigator who was just dying to get hold of the Book of Mormon (no pun intended). We had taught him, then he had tons of problems with a mortgage to work out, so we left him for a while. We ran into him a month later; things had improved, but he still had some issues to take care of. Well this week we had some plans fall through one night and we decided to pay him a visit. He was very excited to see us. :) He’s already in Helaman 6! We talked for about 10 minutes and circled the conversation around to baptism. Earlier, he had a baptismal date, but it had fallen because we stopped teaching him. I asked him how he felt about putting another baptism goal and he readily accepted. He offered the closing prayer, and in it prayed that he would be able to get baptized and that he would be able to prepare himself in time for his goal (mid August). It was a very nice appointment. He has such a humble, accepting heart. He loves the Book of Mormon. It’s a pretty good book :)

This week’s going to be busy! We’ve got conference and interviews with the new Mission President. We’ve also got to work like crazy to get all of our investigators to church. We had one baptism scheduled for Saturday, but he can’t get baptized because he didn’t go to church, so we had to bump it back again. My comp’s great! Today he cooked pizza for the whole district. What a stud!

Love you all tons! The church is true!

-Elder Spencer