Elder Edholm -- week 82

I'm really sorry that I didn't send a letter last week, I don't even know what happened to me. But the baptism went super well. Francisco asked me to baptize him and I just love seeing the huge smiles they have on their face after getting baptized. Now he's a strong member, he's even left with us and he bore his testimony in church on Sunday. But New Years went alright, so much noise and drinking on the street though.

Anyway besides that I've been trying to start to do more activities in the branch because right now we aren't doing any activities and that's what the members say they miss the most is the activities. A couple weeks ago I tried to do like a movie night and almost nobody showed up. I tried it again on Saturday and we had like thirty people! It was a huge success and it motivated me a lot to keep on doing activities to keep motivating the members.

Our investigator Lisandro, I don't know if I've already talked about him, but he is our district president's nephew, he's always hanging out with his son. We were teaching him and we've really been trying to focus on him getting his answer about the Book of Mormon. But finally last week he told us how he did it, he read and then prayed after, which has been really hard for him to do. But he explained to us that while he was praying he felt feelings of happiness and he could recognize that as his answer to his prayer. Now I feel a lot better about his baptismal date on January 21st. I'm glad we could focus on that though because I feel like before I didn't care about them actually being converted, I just wanted a baptism. Now I'm starting to realize more that they're more important, that their conversion is more important. I realized I couldn't keep working like that and then complain later that they were less active if I didn't help them to actually get that conversion.

Oh and yes, I got a new companion, his name is Elder Aguilar, he's from Mexico.

Palmer and Elder Alyk

Francicso's baptism

Elder Aguilar and Francisco and Palmer