This week has been amazing!!!!

I love Buena Vista. Where do I even start... OK, so I got started on the bus, and we arrived and went straight to work visiting potentials from the area book. I don’t even think we unpacked until the third day in the morning, we were so excited. So, we immediately got in touch with our wml, Brother Morales. He is the best wml I have ever met in my LIFE. He has spent, I would guess, 15 hours with us in the past week. He works full time and has a family; I don't know how he does it. Right off the bat he drove us around to show us where our top five potentials and baptismal dates were (there were three when we came in the area; they will get baptized this weekend). He also spends almost as much time helping the sisters out in the north half of the ward. AND he even helps fellowship a couple investigator friends in another neighboring Spanish ward. We were talking to the sisters on Sunday about how we were living off of tortillas and peanut butter since we left all our food in our last house and just had a enough to get a couple things. He overheard and brought us like six grocery bags of food the next day; he is the best…very, very dedicated and excited about missionary work. We report back to him every night about what we have done, so he knows who not to visit, because we already have and what to report in meetings on Sundays. I'll admit, he does take over lessons, but that's fine with me if he helps us out that much.

que mas.... 

Buena Vista South

I guess I didn't have anything to do with my hands so I did this awkward prom pose with elder coronado and didn't realize until I saw the picture.

So I am going to Buena Vista South with Elder Larsen! Elders haven't served there in a couple years; it has always been sisters due to an incident with some elders in the ward...I am very excited. It will be an exciting time and great way to finish off strong speaking Spanish. I will be district leader over an all Spanish district. There are only two Hispanics and the rest are Americans, so we will need to just force the Spanish all the time in district meetings. I think it'll be more like Spanglish, but that's ok; it's better than nothing.

Time is going by too fast!

SO, Elder Weidner and Elder Salazar came over for lunch last week, and right before they left, Elder Weidner (a big guy) decided to jump through the trap door. As soon as he landed, he went straight back making a huge hole in the sheet rock..and he wasn't willing to pay or help fix it! So we did the sheet rock this morning and will paint next week.

Another week has flown on by! We are in the last week of the transfer. We picked up a very solid investigator on Sunday. He didn't even let me finish asking the question before he said yes to being baptized...the 29^th! He has already been coming to church for three weeks and said he will get up 30 minutes earlier everyday to read The Book of Mormon. He is a marine and is in the process of leaving to find other work, because his shoulder is pretty injured; he's in his thirty's. Se llama Anthony. He is a great guy, and the elder’s quorum president is the one he goes to church with. He didn't grow up around here; he is from Texas, but he is here temporarily while he recruits. He is looking for a more solid place to stay and live.

We also taught a lesson to a girl in high school named Sharron, yesterday. The sisters have been teaching her for a few lessons, but she lives in our area, so they called to switch it over to us. The fellowshipper  doesn’t live in her area, but he is willing to come with her to church in West Point. The hard thing is that she lives in the ward with probably the weakest youth in the stake (as far as numbers); there is only one person her age. It'll be tough getting her to love her West Point ward like she has the one in Syracuse. But they definitely need her in the ward to strengthen it. She has a missionary friend out who gets home in a year and says she wants to wait for him to baptize her; we will work on that next lesson. I was trying to be mellow, because the sisters told me that she is a little shy and thinks elders are pushy, so I needed to relax and let them lead things for the first lesson (oh, and of course they told me I needed to smile a lot). So it went well. She is very solid. Once we teach the importance and urgency of baptism, I think she will feel the need for it to happen sooner.

The members are planting seeds...

This is Jarron...he is 8; we taught his family, and he got baptized last week with the other 8 year old stake baptisms. His family will be on the road to the temple!

Yesterday we had MLC (a new version of zlc with the sisters involved). We had a round robin with three different trainings from some zone leaders. We were trained on retaining converts, using the scriptures, and planning. The idea is we receive those and then bring them back to our zones in a zone study this week. So that's what we will do along with Sister Noel (our STL in our zone). We also had our accounting on our zones goals and goals for next month. Our zone set a goal of 10 and had 8 baptisms, so we set another goal of ten for next month. Things are accelerating, and missionaries are picking it up, so I really think it'll happen this month. Lots of good things are happening in the zone.

And of course there are good things happening in West Point as well. We haven't picked up anyone new to teach; still just trying to get people to squeeze us into their schedule. I think I have finally narrowed down what I have been talking about the past few weeks. I think I just want to be more diligent, because we don't really know what to do during the day. So I want to feel overwhelmed, but right now we feel kind of stuck in nightly planning about what to do the next day. It is a good thing, because it gives me a chance to be a better planner which I will need once I get home and have nothing to do to feel productive and will have to do the best with what I have.

I am really working on love. I need to have more love for the people I teach. I mean, of course I do love them, but I just have room to grow. I hope to end my mission more lost in the work than I ever have been rather than slowing down to the finish line. I think the key to doing that is love, and that's what I am pushing for.