Sunday, July 27, 2014

Marcos gets baptized!

Hey everybody!
Well, this week was a bit of a tough one, but overall it ended really well. We had a really good lesson with Marivel on Tuesday all about faith, and she did say she had the faith to be baptized…but just not yet. We don’t really know what’s stopping her…we had a good lesson with the Centeno family all about grace...I don’t know-- We had all of these lessons that I thought were good, but no one really came to church on Sunday. We did bless one of our former investigator’s child that night, and she was all better the next morning, so that was good! Wednesday we went back to a contact we had on Sunday, and it’s this cool little family that was taught back in the day, and they really understood the lesson and were so receptive, so that was the highlight that day for sure. Oh, and Happy Birthday. Mom! 

Thursday we sort of played marriage counselors to two of our new investigators who are having relationship problems. We shared all about love and whatnot…I hope it helped…They sure do have a lot of problems. We did have the coolest new investigator though! She was taught a little less than a year ago and was coming to church and everything, but she moved away, and just came back! We set a baptismal date for August on that first visit. 
Friday we had a ton of lessons, and we just had fun with the work. I don’t know, we were just super happy that day. Even though we had investigators just shut down baptismal invitations like so hard, it was just a good day. Fevelyn, our recent convert just got called to be the branch chorister, so we helped her practice leading music that night. Just a good day. Saturday we had a good zone goal setting in the morning, and then we had the craziest baptism ever…Well, the craziest baptism that almost didn’t happen. I won’t go into all the details because of a lesson that Elder Lund, one of the senior missionaries, taught me: it’s all about perspective. At the end of the day the doctrine of Christ is that a man must exercise faith, repent, be baptized, receive the Holy Ghost, and endure to the end. And even if all the details weren’t perfect, Marcos Rivera was baptized last Saturday, and what else could possibly matter more? Sunday he was confirmed a member, and just kept telling me how happy he was! It was great.
Elder Christensen and Marcos!

Nancy was our only investigator besides Marcos who was at church, but that’s ok. I was feeling pretty sick all day on Sunday, which made me not so effective during lessons. We did get some work done though. We found that our recent convert Niko has not been making the best decisions lately. He showed up to church early in street clothes, then left to change and never came back…I’m worried about him…but yeah, the day ended ok with cooking up some breakfast burritos, thanks to the tortillas Mom slipped into my last package! And I just want to end this email with a quick, fun story. So it was our town’s fiesta recently, and a bunch of streets are blocked off with these tents selling things. While we were walking through there one day and this kid, maybe three years old, comes up to us holding his moms hand and says, “Police!!!!” I had to laugh. It was adorable. Then his mom sort of corrected him, by saying, “No they’re not police…maybe Jesus’ police!” And that made me smile a bit. This month we’re going to work on smiling more and just being positive no matter what, which has been a real weakness of mine to be honest ever since I got to Baler. I just get super stressed and frustrated…it’s just been a whole new level of stress here! But I will work on it, and the Lord will help me. He sure is trying me sometimes, but he’s helping too.

 Love you all!
--Elder Christensen 

**When I asked him in my letter how he liked being a zone leader, he said that overall he loves it, but that he’s never been so stressed in his life. 
He says he’s been stressed, sick and sleep deprived this week, but having Marcos get baptized helped get him through this past weekend.**

And now here are some pictures of his zone:








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