Shotgun Fail

So these last few weeks I've had nothing to say and all the time in the world to say it, this week I have SO much to say and have 10 minutes. I was even going to send a ton of pictures!

Yesterday we had a zone conference with Presidente Levrino and his wife. The very last one for them. It got rescheduled so many times that finally they had to do it on a Monday...so we didn't have a preparation day today because of it. But it was so worth it because Presidente Levrino is so inspired and really any meeting associated with the Church is meant for us to be able to change something to put our life in harmony with God's will.

So we have an investigator Emilio and he's come to church for a while and he wants to get baptized because he's sick and might need an operation and wants to be healed, but he doesn't really understand things still. This week we decided we'd have a shotgun baptism and visit him everyday to prepare him. After everything going wrong, we got him to an interview in the city with the stake president and the elders had the font filled and prepped with nice warm water (instead of having freezing water in our pool in Bella Vista.) Emilio passed his interview but he changed his mind last minute and said he couldn't get baptized because his daughter made a promise with the virgin so that his biopsy results came back with good news and that he couldn't get baptized yet because she was upset that his baptism would destroy her promise with the virgin.....

But we saw good progress with Natalia. She is 18 and her mom is inactive. She studied with Jehovah's Witnesses for 4 years before the elders started teaching her a couple years back. They didn't baptize her, but they inactived her from her other church...We found her because her mom was a referral. She accepted to be baptized if she knew the Book of Mormon was true. On divisions with the ward members, I went to visit her but she hadn't read and prayed, so we read together in 3 Nephi 11. When I asked her how she felt after reading she said she felt a lot of peace and like God was hugging her. We helped her realize that is an answer that it is true! In the prayer at the end she thanked God for helping her know it's true. She has a baptismal date for the 28^th.

This week I hit my one year mark. I was gonna change my toothbrush like Amanda but I was too tired to run upstairs and back down to the bathroom so that never happened. We did get to help Familia Toledo (one of the two solid families in the branch) make Arabian empanadas and cook them in their mud oven. That was the extent of my celebrations for my mission birthday.

I have so much more to say and NO time. Maybe next week I'll have time to write more!

Love,

Hermana Pearson

PS at the conference I finally got mail! Of the 10 or so letters that came 7 were for me! Wahoo.