My new
comp is Elder Lopez. He’s from West
Valley City, Utah, now but lived in Aguas
Calientes, Mexico, until he was 10ish. He has been out 14 months. We've known each other since he came out.
He was “born” in Battle
Mountain while I was in Fallon,
haha. He'd rather be doing regular missionary work all the time than have to do
some of the zone leader stuff we do, but he’s happy to be here and excited to
be in a Spanish
ward. Most of what I’ll be trying to
do is get him ready to take over the area in one transfer (6 weeks – well, 5
now) because that’s going to come really fast. We've got some finding goals
which have already started pretty well. We got 2 new investigators this
week who are both pretty solid and should be picking up a few more this next
week. We set 2 people with a baptism date the first day he was here, so
that was fun, but then we found out one is already going to have to be pushed
back and the other looks a little sketchy at the moment, but we will see. We
also want to increase ward involvement and get more organized, but its
difficult doing it all at once because Elder Lopez just needs to meet people
first and gain their trust. Hopefully by the end everything will be ready for
him.
F. is doing pretty solid. He doesn’t have the priesthood yet, but the ward is working with him, so things are going pretty well. He came to our ward party this week and it was the first party he’s been to in a year because his old church didn’t allow dancing or "worldly music" etc. He loved it and had a great time. His sister and her family came too and also really enjoyed it, but no surprise there because the party was GREAT! They hired a Mariachi to come and serenade all the Moms in the ward, and they were great. It was so much fun. We had several of our other converts there and they all fellowshipped really well. Plus the bishop and a couple other members are DJs so they had the whole DJ set up and everything, haha. Went really well.
This week, of our investigators we just had M. and E. at church, even though we had a lot more people promise to be there. We were happy to have those two though, but E. lost the key to turn on her oxygen tank and we can’t find it anywhere, so she is really struggling trying to figure out what she is going to do without that. We've been praying and feel like everything is going to work out, so we hope so! E. is set for baptism June 16th but this whole key to the oxygen tank thing is a huge trial for her, so hopefully everything works out. The other one with a baptism date it T. She’s set for June 9th, but that has to be pushed back because she still didn’t make it to church. She has to come 3 times still but she’s been taught almost everything.
Lately we have been
running out of things to teach 3 of our recent converts, B., L., and R ( who
are 10, 8, and 8), so this week was super great that I had a new companion
to bring new ideas to teaching them! Elder Lopez had a great idea to read
the story of the Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s burying
their weapons of war from the illustrated Book of Mormon stories book and
then to draw weapons. On the weapons we each wrote things we wanted
to give up that we don’t do right and then we went into the backyard and dug a
whole and buried them. It was pretty fun and went really well. Hadn’t tried
that one before!
Oh ya, and we also
got another set of sisters into the zone so we had to help them move in
and set stuff up for them this week, but now it is pretty much good to go
I think so hopefully the extra companionship will bring more work to the zone!
We are now the biggest zone in the mission by 2 companionships.
