Week one of 2017!

Dear Family,

How are you all? Life is good here on the west side of the valley :)

We had a good week with lots door knocking and teaching and meeting

this week! It has been sooooo busy lately. And the weather has been

pretty crazy all week! The roads have been terrible up until the melt

today! But it made things a little more fun and interesting. The slick

roads have made it easier to turn around without having my comp get

out and back me up :) Here's the sum up of the week!

On pday last week we went on a hike on the East side! It was really

fun! It was snowing a ton but it was a lot of fun. One of the elders

in our zone has a go pro so we got some good coverage of the event,

but I dont have the fotos yet, so I'll send them out when I get them!

It was a busy day so I kinda sent just a lame email but with lots of

photos to make up for it :) That night we had a great lesson with the

Gonzalez family who are less actives. They're super awesome though and

we're going to try to pout them on date this week for reactivation.

One of their sons has tons of great questions so it makes the lessons

fun. The rest of the night was just spent trying to contact/visit some

other people since our two other lessons canelled.

Tuesday was a pretty similar day. We had several lessons fall through

and so we contacted a bunch of references we got from an english

member and did some finding as well. We did have someone we contacted

invite us in and so we shared the 4 minute restoration with him! He

had talked to missionaries in the past and told us that he didn't mind

having us over but he didn't want to talk about religion. Then he

proceeded to talk about is own religion and beliefs. It was pretty

funny :). But we were able to share the restoration with him, so we

were happy about that.

Highlights of Wednesday: we did weekly planning because Thursday we

had MLC. Then that night we had a lesson with our recent converts the

Gil family! It was great. Those were pretty much all the highlights of

the day.

Thursday...MLC! It was a long day of meetings but it was really

uplifting. We talked about the Restauración of the gospel as well as

love (in the gospel sense). There was a recent convert that got

invited to that who shared her conversion story with us. It was really

powerful. She was one of the only grandkids in her family who hadn't

been baptized in the catholic church and so her family was extremely

disappointed in her for choosing to get baptized in the LDS church.

She was basically disowned by her grandparents but felt like her

grandparents would thank her in the long run. It was really powerful

to hear her testimony. It was the plan of salvation for her that

really helped her realize it was true.

So we had to take the things from MLC and make a training for the zone

out of it. So we met with the Sister Training Leaders after MLC to

discuss the training for the next day, and got things sorted out that

night. We had to rush to dinner right after all that so it made for a

crazy day. The training the next day went great! We focused on some

skills from preach my gospel (asking inspired questions) and the

sisters focused on love and prayer. It was all put together last

minute but we did the best we could with what we were given and it

came out great! I felt like we were blessed greatly for it all to come

together so well.

Saturday we had lots of lessons cancel but we had one of my favorite

lessons of my whole mission with a less active family, the Flores

family that night. We had a different lesson plan to start off with,

but when we got in we realized that their concerns were with the book

of mormon and faith! So we impromptu changed the lesson and read Alma

32 with them. The spirit was there incredibly strong and all of us in

the room felt the confirmation of the spirit that the book of mormon

was true. It made me and the brother we were teaching both tear up! It

was one of my favorite experiences so far of my mission. The Book of

Mormon is true.

Well I'm out of time but I love you all! Hope you have a good week!

Elder Baxter

MLC :)