7 people on date for baptism

This week was gooood! We have 7 people on date for Baptism. Odilia
Villa, she is a single mother with 2 sons, her kids are kind of a
handful. She hasn't come to church yet so we're working on that and
she agreed to being baptized on Jan. 21 and so did her 10 yr old son.
The mom and 2 sons of the Riveras family: Its a family of 6 and we've
been teaching them for a while. The father has had bad experiences
with other churches and is unsure. The family is pretty much divided,
where the mom is all for it, the dad and 2 daughters are hesitant. We
have trouble getting in contact with them and getting them to church.
Luis Velasquez, we got him on date last week, he's about 40 and
unmarried. His family lives in mexico and he's pretty accepting of
everything. He's on date for December 24th.
Eduardo Soliz, he's about 20 and lives with some friends in one of the
trailer parks. Apparently the missionaries found him a year and a half
ago and taught him a lot but couldn't ever get him to commit to
baptism. We met with him at the beginning of this week and I shared
Ether 12:6, "You will receive no witness until after the trial of your
faith" and he told us that it was a social thing, he was worried about
what his friends from work would think and they had been giving him
some trouble. So we used that scripture and asked him to read and pray
about it, and on friday afternoon we got a text that said he wanted to
be baptized! We're going for the 24th of December.
So those are our seven, We also met with Daniel and Nancy, he hadn't
read or prayed since our last visit, unfortunately so we recommitted
him to do that and commited him to come to church, and they did! They
came to sunday school, but had to go home early to get ready for work,
but before they left we took them to go meet the primary teacher and
his daughter really wanted to go, so thats good! Its a good sign your
investigator will come to church if their daughter cries because she
couldn't go to primary that day.
We met with another couple for the first time on Thursday night. On
this night ours and the Sunny side elders' schedules conflicted so we
couldn't have dinner at the same time, so we were just going to go get
our free meal at subway. So we were meeting with these new
investigators Pedro and Isela for the first time, and Isela asks if
we'd had Dinner and we told her we were going to subway. She said
she'd feed us. And Pedro said "You know, all of this stuff, my home,
this food, isn't mine. It was given to me by the Lord and what kind of
person would I be if I didn't share it?" They basically said we could
come and eat anytime. Pedro asked me to pray for him to come closer to
god and have a soft heart. It was awesome! This tuesday we're going
back for Dinner and lesson 1 so we'll see how it goes!
We found a couple people while tracting this week, the one that stands
out most was a lady we met in an apartment complex, Eva. We knocked on
her door and she opened it and told us to come in. She gave us her
whole religious shpeal. She used to be a bad person with a lot of
addictions but she's getting better, through reading the bible and
religion. She started out catholic and had all of her statues of
saints in her home, and one day read in the bible about Idolatry. The
first thing she did was go around smashing her virgin marry statues
with a hammer and throwing them all away. She then turned to Jehovahs
witness, and was comparing their bible with the regular one, and saw
that they had cut a lot of stuff out of it so she dropped them, and
went Baptist. and thats where she is now. So I told her about the book
of mormon, how the reason why there are so many religions is because
everybody interprets the bible differently, and I used the metaphor
from Tad R. Callisters awesome Book of Mormon talk from Conference.
Read it! Thats an order! anyway how if you draw a dot on a piece of
paper, how many lines can you draw through it? like a million! but if
you draw a second dot on that same paper, how many lines can you draw
that go through both of those dots? Just 1. The first dot represents
the bible the many lines represent different churches. The second dot
represents the Book of Mormon, and the line that goes through both of
those dots is the True Church of Jesus Christ, The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints. So I used the dot metaphor and we gave
her a book of mormon and asked her if whe would read from it and she
said she would, so thats good, we'll go back and visit her this week
and see how she liked it, and teach her.
Sunday was good. We had a Recent convert fireside in Yakima, and it
was awesome! It was good to see Ma and Pa Greer, and all the other
elders in the Zone and the Assistants to the President. We sang our
mission song, which is a compilation of Called to Serve and The lord
needs valiant servants. Its a pretty sweet song. Sister Greer asked me
to learn to play it on the piano because Brother and Sister Wilson are
going home in 6 months and she's the one that usually plays it. So
I'll have to work on that. The Whites have a piano that I play when we
have a bit of spare time. Anyway thats about it!