Teresa was baptized!

Elder Coronado, Teresa, Bishop Colohan is baptizing her, and the ward mission leader there, Brother Crockett, confirmed her. He is the one that served in Mesa.

Teresa got baptized this week. It was great to have so much help from a great ward. They set most everything up, and we just filled the font and showed up. She is already halfway through the recent convert lessons, because we had started doing them even before she was baptized, because she wanted to learn more so quickly. Things will go well for her. She stood up to share her thoughts at the end of the baptism and told everyone she had waited a long time and wasn't sorry that she did it. Her next day was the confirmation, and she was very happy, as was Garland. They had to leave right after sacrament, because Garland can't last through all of church, but she will usually stay and maybe they will bring the sacrament to him; I am not sure.

SO now we are just looking for other non-members to teach! Keep praying for us finding new people. Yesterday, we had a lesson with Gavin...he hadn’t come to church the day before, because his aunt took him to a hockey game. We talked about who he wanted to be as far as values and asked his mom what kind of person he wanted to be. He told us, and we talked about how baptism will bring that. Then as we were wrapping up, his Mom kind of nudged him to tell us something. Then he said thank you for teaching me, but "I won’t be needing your assistance anymore." He felt like he had learned enough ways to feel the Spirit and didn't think he needed anymore than that. He can read the Book of Mormon if he gets time, or go to church, but doesn't need the lessons. I guess he really just didn't get how much we were stressing the necessity of baptism. So then the ward mission leader took over and talks for 10 minutes about I don't know what, and we shared our testimonies and left. So that was too bad, never thought I would get dropped by a 12 year old, but it happened.

Another week has flown by

Another week has flown by. I lose track of time so easily as a missionary. I still love West Point.

We had zone conference last week, and it went well. It was from 8-4 so it was a very long one. The assistants trained on contacting, which a lot of missionaries needed, so that was great. It made me miss being in Ogden. We hardly ever get TTI's in West Point, and when I say hardly ever, I mean hardly ever. Since it's all neighborhoods, and it's winter, no one is ever outside. It's not like we can go to the convenience store since we don't have one in our area. So I want to apply that training more than I am.

President and Sister Hiers trained on faith and the atonement. It was fantastic. President Hiers is a powerful speaker as is his wife. I love them both; they are definitely a huge, if not majority of the reason I was called to this mission.

Time moves swiftly

Another p-day! This week has been great as always. Elder Coronado and I love serving together and are working hard in West Point. Today we got our suits dry cleaned, and it was definitely time.

So, recently I have been dragging out planning to be way long, so I wanted to get it done more quickly, in 30 minutes. So we started to do abs every night to motivate us to finish planning, so we can get to abs. It's funny how often it actually happens, and how often we get caught up calling missionaries in the zone, or fall asleep planning on the couch. I think it has only actually happened once in the past week. I guess that means we are working hard enough to be exhausted at the end of the day, or we are just very out of shape, because we ride in a car all day.

The no sugar thing has been good, we get offered dessert 1-3 times everyday and most people are ok with it, but they always need an explanation of why we are saying no. Some say good for you and others just seem unhappy that we said no to their dessert/candy. We ate with the Facers twice this week, and she hid all sweets in her house for us; she is the Kristiansen fellowshipper (one of them) and the ones we killed the turkey with at thanksgiving.

Our overabundance of vegetables with our chicken. Sorry, this is about the only picture I have on my iPad. 

Another great week in my favorite city in Utah. It has still been a struggle with New Years and everything to find people, especially, or set up lessons, but I am getting a better idea of how to work effectively. I am getting really good at evaluating daily on what is working; the problem is deciding how to actually change what isn't working. I have said it before; I think the most valuable skill I have learned on my mission is how to grow. Speaking of that, since we have an older zone, we recognized a lot of what we needed to do was help our missionaries grow and that in turn will positively influence their investigators. We asked the assistants to come give a training in our zone on Christlike attributes, and it went very well; they loved it. They had us all pick one and set specific, daily actions we would do to better ourselves with the attribute we had chosen for the rest of the transfer. I picked two things, gratitude and virtue. I am not trunky, but nearing the finish line is pushing me really hard to want to do everything I possibly can to grow out here. I am trying to focus more on our investigators, but it is very difficult. We really struggle with daily contact with people being so busy especially with precedents set in the past by us and past missionaries of once a week contact, which does not cut it.

Yesterday, we had a zone study to set baptismal goals for the month of January. Our companionship set a goal of three baptisms this month. It is pretty high with what we have right now, but we will do everything we can to get it. The zone baptized 14 last month, they set a goal of 17. That means we need to pick things up and get out of this rut we are in from Christmas since numbers really dropped around the holidays. We had our missionaries commit to changing and being better for their investigators, so we can hit our goal. I feel good about it; we just cannot lose the excitement that we had yesterday.