March 23, 2015

Awesome contacting story time!  Early in the week Elder Santillan had read the story in 1 Nephi where Nephi goes to get the plates from Laban and ends up killing him. Well, we replaced the word "kill" with "contact" and that added a whole new level of understanding to the story. Ever since then we've been focusing more than ever on asking for references and contacting families and our efforts are starting to pay off. For example, the other day we went to the plaza to look for families. While there we decided that while our main focus would be families, we were also going to contact any person that we felt the spirit was directing us to. Immediately after deciding that we both went straight to a single man sitting on the other side of the plaza. While we were talking with him he kept expressing his desires to learn more, to come unto Christ, and actually thanked us for stopping and talking to him. I've never had a contact quite like that, and I know that the spirit directed us to him. Afterwards Elder Santillan turned to me and said he had seen that guy and it was like he was glowing - he was so sure we needed to talk to him, and I felt the exact same way. The experience really confirmed to me that the Lord will put those that are prepared in our path, and when we open our mouths, when we do everything we can to share the Gospel, we will find those people.

In other news, we're having two baptisms this saturday! Well, if Alex passes his interview... But two investigators are getting baptized - an old guy named Balvino and a teenage kid named Alex. Balvino was a reference from the zone leaders, a member of their branch invited him to church and he had gone every week for a month or so before they found out he lives in our sector. We've been meeting with him though and teaching him for a couple weeks now. The guy has so much faith, I can not believe it. He literally takes every word that leaves our mouths like it's scripture and was so excited to be baptized. Alex is an investigator that they've been teaching for a few months now. His story's a little interesting, because we had originally put the date of March 28 for his baptism, but then he stopped keeping his commitments, didn't go to church at all, seemed like he just didn't care. But then it's like he realized how important this was. We found him in the street one day and he totally ripped us a new one because we hadn't visited him that week. He was so concerned that we had forgetten about him or that he had offended us or something and he just told us "I can't get baptized without your help, you guys gotta keep coming over!" When that happened we realized like this really was important to him, and we were so happy. We didn't have time to talk with him right then because we had a lesson, but we invited him to come to the lesson with us. In that lesson he shared the most sincere, heartfelt testimony I had ever heard. The next day, Sunday, not only did he come to church without us reminding him, but he was there early in a shirt and tie. I don't know what changed him, but I'm so happy it happened. But moral of this story is that the church is true, and the next time I email there should be a couple of baptism pictures attached.

Hope you're all doing well at home. I love hearing from you guys every week.

Jeremy