Monday, February 28, 2011

El Fin de Febrero

Dear family and friends,

Another week gone by here in El Cruce. The news about transfers today is that there is no news. Elder Castro Peña y I will be staying together another transfer. This last transfer was pretty rough with all the moving so we are looking forward to a nice tranquilo transfer y hoping to have some success! We are still having some HOT summer weather, it has been super humid lately. Hope you are all still enjoying the snow! I would love to have some of that down here!

This week I had my second EVER baptism interview that went really well. It was a lady that the Zone Leaders had been teaching named Lucy. We spent 15 min talking with everyone in her 1 bedroom apartment, then headed up to the roof to have a private place to do the interview. It was amazing to see how well prepared she was and how excited she was about her baptism and the gospel. During the interview however something came up about something she had done in the past that she felt she hadn´t truly repented of. I knew that in the case that something like that came up... Pres. Stapley had to do the interview y I couldn´t make any promises as to whether she would be able to get baptized that Saturday or not, which I knew would be very disappointing for her. From that moment on I was praying very hard to know what to say. I don´t remember exactly what we talked about but everything turned out really well and I felt that she had truly repented of what she had done. She told me several times that she had never told ANYONE in her whole life, and it suprised me to see for one that she trusted me, and 2 that she recognized the importance of being honest y prepared for the covenant she was about to make with God. Long story short, she was able to have an interview with Pres. Stapley the next day and got baptized on Saturday!!

Also some very sad news this week that I want to be brief about... but Monday night I got a call at around 230 in the morning from an Elder in my district who was spending the night with 2 other Elders while his comp went to Capital to do documents. He said that one of the Elders had left around 11 to "go to the plaza to sleep" (weird) y that he still hadn´t returned. Even weirder was that his companion let him go like it was nothing bad at all. I called the Zone Leaders several times with no response so I eventually ended up calling the Assistants (felt bad waking them up, but when it´s an EMERGENCY) who in turn called Pres. Stapley. Around 330 the Elder showed up again at the pension, so I was able to get back to sleep at least... but I know there were several people that weren´t so lucky and didn´t sleep at all that night. The next day I got a call saying that the 2 Elders that were involved were on a plane home... which was actually a big shock because one of them was one of my companions several transfers ago.

Anyways, don´t want to end on a sad note.... Yesterday we also had a cool experience. Before leaving the pension to go to church, my companion y I said a prayer that our investigators, by some MIRACLE, would be able to make it to church that day. When we got to the bus stop we were only there a couple minutes before we saw what we thought was an answer to our prayers. A returned sister missionary walking towards the stop with her inactive brother y her non member mom who is a SUPER evangelist! We had a cita with them the night before and we were thinking MAYBE something we had shared had her interested in coming to church with us. Turns out she was actually headed to a conference at her church... Little disappointing, but we didn´t give up hope. As we were greeting everyone arriving to Sacrament meeting we found that an Hermana had brought one of her friends to church that day, so we were able to talk with her a bit, as well as the daughter of another family who brought her boyfriend who we have recently started to teach! Truly an answer to our prayers. They both enjoyed the church y couldn´t have been a more perfect topic on the talks talking about the Family y preparing for the future.

Anyways, that´s all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a great week! Thank you for all your prayers and support!

les amo
Elder Ian Wheelhouse

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