Week 82- One of the most successful weeks.

Dear family!!

Thanks you for your letters.   You always put great detail about what happens during the week, stuff like going about your day and your normal routine... going to exercise, a trip to grocery store, church activities, and stuff  you do at home like baking a cake, cleaning around, etc. Little things like that.  When I stop and think about it,  I miss the normal routine of life back home. I almost forgot how it feels. But, in some ways, I'm glad to be far away from the normal routine and culture of life in the US, it will make me appreciate the little things so much more when I return home. 
You guys must be excited just like me that we will be talking in just about 2 weeks! I still don't have the details of the call, but you will know as soon as I find out. 

I'm glad you finished putting up all the decorations and lights and now you can enjoy it for the next few weeks. The Christmas season goes by so fast. There is no Christmas here, like there is at home off course, but at least in the grocery store and a few other stores in the city there are some decorations. We haven't bought any decorations for the house. I don't think I really want them anyway. And here the time is going by extremely fast, it's unbelievable!

This week was amazing! It was probably one of the most successful weeks I've had on my mission. Everything went just right. when a  missionary is doing everything right  he would hope to have many lessons, many contacts, find many investigators, and  have many of them attend church; and to see solid progress in the Gospel in all of them. We had all of that this week.

Every day we worked super hard to find new investigators by contacting people on the road. And we were able to teach our lessons to many of them this week. We found a total of 15 new investigators just this week. We are currently teaching 12 families in our area. Our two families who are preparing for baptism on the 25th are doing really well. And both made progress with obtaining some of their documents to be able to get married. We hope to finish up all their docs and open their processes by this Friday. We are planning on having their marriages on the 24th. The other two missionaries in my district also expects to have 2 families married on that day. So we have the potential as a district to baptize 4 families on the 25th, which would really be amazing! And we're doing everything we can to make sure all will work out as planned.

This week we had 40 lessons in total, that’s huge! Usually I would expect to have that many lessons fall during the week, this has happened my whole mission. But this week we had none of our lesson appointments fall through. This area is being extremely blessed and I'm so grateful for the small miracles that I see happening here. We had 20 investigators at church and a total attendance of 115! It seems like many people's hearts in this area are being softened and seem more willing to hear our message.  It's amazing. And things just continue to get better. Last month we baptized a girl, Emilia; and on Saturday we baptized her brother.  He was super happy after he was baptized.

Also this week the branch held Sunday meetings at our house for the last time. The church now has rented a new meeting house for the branch! And it's a lot bigger and in a better location with better access. Now that all the things that are for the use of the branch were moved out of our house. Our house has a lot more space, we cleaned and organized our place and it is a lot more comfortable now.

As you can see, this was a fantastic week. I hope things continue to go this way going forward. But even when things don't go the way we like them, I'm still grateful. My whole mission has been a test of patience. I've been in so many areas and passed many transfers with little success, and baptisms have been few and far in between.  But right now is different. I've never been in a situation with such a potential for so many more baptisms in the coming weeks. I feel blessed as if the constant hard work and dedication is finally paying off  when I see the fruits of the work being done by seeing the happiness that the Gospel bring into people's lives. I know that many of the people that I have taught and decided not to join the church now, will some day come to Christ.

I'm glad that you guys are all healthy and happy and having a good December. Thank you for sharing your testimonies with me. I love you sooo much and hope you have a great week!!

Love,
Josh