January 21, 2013

Jan 21

Hey Everyone! Hope you all got to look at the pictures I sent! They are pretty awesome!! This week we´ve got transfers again, so we´ll see what happens, if I leave or if I stay... "Should I stay or should I go" (the song, haha)

 

This week we had 4 baptisms!!! Albertina Piriz 63, Celia Benitez 28, Raul Almiron 9, and Aldana Kigental 8. It was a huge success, and after a lot of really hard, challenging weeks, and little battles, we finally were able to see all the success! I also found out that my trainer Elder Taylor actually taught Celia 3 years ago when he was in my area, and it was amazing to see how we were guided by the spirit to find her, and to get her baptized to be able to recieve so many new blessings! We have been teaching her for like 6 weeks now, and it was honestly extremely difficult to teach her, because she´s got 4 little kids, without a father figure, so they are really really bad at behaving, and soemtiems threw rocks at us, or would come jump on us with their dirty little hands and feet and get us all dirty, or they´d yell during the lesson, and just a bunch of really annoying distractions! But finally we were able to teach her well enough to get baptized, and she is a completely different person now. It was a miracle that we found her as well, because we were just passing by, and I looked at hte house, saw her, and just stopped to talk to her, and she actually rejected us completely at first, but the spirit told me to just keep insisting, because personally I don´t like to insist more than once or twice when people reject us, but the spirit told me to just keep going, and she finally let us in and from the first charla I could tell that she was pretty prepared. But she had a lot of obstacles personally with her family and everything.

 

The baptism was awesome, but also had a lot of little obstacles of its own haha. Obstacle number one, the water was from the river, so it was like completely brown. Obstacle number two, two of the little kids started fighting, one pushed the other, and the one fell down and hit his nose really hard and started bleeding all over the place, and the blood got all over my companion´s shirt right before the baptism. Third obstacle, our branch presidente got really sick, and couldn´t make it, so we had to call and round up his councelors. Fourth obstacle the little kids that were going to get baptized didn´t show up for a whole hour, and we had to start really late. But haha even with all that, we were finally able to just get them all baptized, and it was a wonderful night, full of a ton of excitement, and true joy. This week was pretty crazy preparing for all that, but now that it´s over and they´re all extremely happy, I´m extremely happy too. Thanks for all the prayers, without them I don´t know that we could have done it! We just about stretched ourselves over the limit! But we also helped Maria Piriz move to her new house, so that was a lot of fun. But I´m out of time, thanks for everything, I love you all, hope all is well! Have a wonderful week!! I´ll answer all the questions next week! Love Elder Allsup