Baptisms next weekend! :)

Dear family and friends,

Here's my week:

Monday--I got a haircut finally! Then we went and did our shopping and other normal P-day activities. We played volleyball and soccer outside to take advantage of the good weather while we have it. I played goalie! It was rough. That night we didn't have any lessons, just some visits and contacting.

Tuesday--after doing studies we had service! We went and helped someone clean out their storage shed. He bought us lunch afterward at PizzaRev, a create your own pizza place. It was soooooo good. Then we got home and had to deal with some bike stuff. The bike I used to use while I was here is being used by its owner now...so the new bike that I was going to use was a mission bike and was getting repaired, so I had a super crappy loaner bike for a while. Both of the tires kept going flat and so we had been doing a bunch of walking. But on Tuesday I finally got a good bike :) walking is nice for a break from biking, but I'm glad I don't have to walk all the time. So after going to the mission storage shed to get the bike, we went out and worked (mostly contacting/finding) until dinner. Two of our three lessons that night cancelled. But we did finish off the night with an awesome lesson with Hermana Andrade. We taught her about the spirit world, and she was very receptive. We've been stopping by every day lately just to have daily contact and show our support and love. Also on the way home this nonmember gave us a bunch of this delicious soup called Pozole, and a bunch of other food she just grabbed off her dinner table for us. It was super generous.

Wednesday -- we had a lesson in the morning with Juan. He is still taking tons of notes about the Book of Mormon and has been praying sincerely about it. He asks tons of good questions, but it's starting to prevent us from teaching the other stuff as well. So we're gonna work on that for next week. He's pretty busy so we can only meet with him once a week. We also made cookies and wrote thank you notes, had a coordination meeting, and took Sergio Arroyo to a temple chapel session at our stake center.

Thursday -- it was a pretty good day today. We had our normal studies in the morning, then weekly planning for 3 hours. Watched endless "I'm a Mormon" videos during lunch and we were dying laughing about some of them. The humor continued into weekly planning, so it was a pretty good time, relatively speaking. :) We had some lessons cancel, contacted several people and were able to drop and add some people to our are area book. It was a pretty productive evening. Then that night was super crazy because we had to go on splits, but one of the other members (a young men's aged kid) had to be picked up kind of far away from the appointment...and we were running kind of late, so we had to leave elder Page at the members house where we were going to have the lesson, then Hermano Carrasco and I went to pick up the young man from the other side of town and run to a lesson. When we got to the house the gate was locked and we couldn't get to the door, but we could tell they were there. so after calling them didn't work we resorted to throwing pebbles at the window. But sadly that didn't work either...so we made a couple of visits instead and we got to see the Tamayo family! I haven't seen them in a long time, so that was fun.

Friday--we had district meeting! It went well. One of the Elders in our district had to go to the hospital because of stomach problems, and the only other missionaries in our district are sisters, so we almost had to improvise and do district meeting over FaceTime. But luckily the zone leaders were able to come and save the day. Also, cool story of the day: we decided to say a specific prayer to be able to find someone that was ready to hear the gospel-- if we talked with literally everyone we saw. So we did it and we ended up finding 3 people that were either ready to start coming back to church or be baptized. It didn't come in the way that was expected, but our prayer was answered.The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.

Saturday:

We did service in the morning and then had a couple lessons/ visits. At the end of the day we taught the Moreno family, who are on date to be baptized but aren't coming tu church, and helped them clean their house so that they could get to bed on time and make it to church at 9. Then on Sunday they didn't end up coming. Sunday was a good day despite that, but we were pretty sad they didn't come. Dayanara and her family came, and their all set and excited to get baptized next weekend!

Well love you all! Hope you have a good week!

Love,

Elder Baxter