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| 3 MAN BICYCLE |
Here in La Concepciòn things are starting to progress again! We have been working with the family of Dennis and Nineth who I have been talking about for the past few weeks and they are rapidly improving! They both accepted a baptismal date for the 12th of May (happy birthday dad:)) and we are going to arrange a small wedding for them before the baptismal service. They both want to get married which we were relieved to find out seeing as how they need to be married in order to get baptized! This whole week they promised us that they were going to come to church and then yesterday morning we passed by their house at about 8 to make sure they were getting ready and they were all still asleep! Luckily their 8 year old named Justo was outside running around so he went in and woke them up. With a little persuasion on our part they started getting ready and we started our walk to the church. Dennis and Nineth and their two kids, Kateline and Justo stayed all 3 hours and seemed to enjoy it! After church Nineth asked to see the baptismal font so she could see what their baptism would be like. They told us afterwards that all 3 hours were beautiful. We are going to visit them tomorrow and hopefully they can continue to progress!
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| LUNCH IN LA CONCEPCION |
We found a new family this past week. Their names are Fernando and Elia and they have 3 kids. We were contacting one day and contacted the oldest daughter of the family named Carla who is about 17 and she told us where she lived and invited us to come teach them this past saturday. The lesson went really well and we invited them to come to church the next day. We weren´t really expecting a whole lot since they had just barely met us, however the mom and 3 children all showed up to church yesterday! They also stayed all 3 hours and afterwards said that they loved it.
As you know, earlier this month we baptized Josè Otoniel and we have also been working with his older brother Steven who is 19. Steven is awesome and ever since he saw his younger brother´s baptism he has been telling us that he wants to get baptized. Every investigator has struggles however, and his is that he studies on Saturday and Sunday mornings. It´s a difficult situation. His family is pretty poor...their house is about the size of a normal bedroom. He told us that he wants to come to church because he knows it´s the right thing to do, but that he saved up a lot of money to pay for his schooling and he doesn´t want to just drop out after he´s already paid the money. We promised him that if he studied and prayed about it that the Lord would help him be able to find a solution. Right now he´s been working extra hard on Saturday so that he can miss part of his class on Sunday to come to church. He came to church yesterday and I feel bad that he has to miss his class but sometimes in life we have to sacrifice the good in order to do what´s best. He has more than 3 times that he has attended church so it´s possible that he could be baptized this upcoming Saturday. We´re not exactly sure yet, though. We are going to visit him early this week!
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| SERVICE: 3 HOURS OF CHOPPING WOOD |
This past Sunday we had a record 9 investigators come to church!! Which I´d have to say is a little better than the past 2 weeks when we had nobody. It felt great to see the investigators we have been working with keep a commandment of the Lord by attending church!
This past week everyone in our zone had interviews with President Monestel. My interview was pretty basic, he just asked me how things were with my companion and checked my planner to make sure we had been working. He likes to joke around a little bit and asked me if I had punched Elder Real yet! (Elder Real has a little bit of a reputation for being impatient and very easily angered haha.) I told him that as of right now I still hadn´t punched him and that we were doing just fine! Haha. The interview went well and I was relieved that I was able to understand all of his questions!
Well, that´s about all for this week! I love and miss you all. The church is true!
Love, Elder Parrish
