Well we have been trying to adjust to the changes down here in Yuma, and it's pretty intense. There were an incredible amount and we've had quite the time juggling all of these new wards and trying to get things started in all of them. We were trying to think about how we were able to do it so quickly with the 4th ward...we already know most of the members and have a lot of solid investigators there. Speaking of which, we had Annette's baptism this past week and it was awesome! We had a whole lot of support from the ward, and it was cool to see her grandpa baptize her. Apparently he had grown up in Utah next to a church and was curious so he just started going... It was a pretty cool story, and he actually lives in Mexico so it was awesome that he was able to come up. And since he's a little older, he forgot some things with the prayer and everything, and there were a couple times she didn't go completely under the water. So I think overall we had to do it about five times, but she loved it and he was just so proud of her. It was just an incredible baptism, and we got to have a way good luncheon afterwards. It was cool - the young women in the ward made her a candy bar poster. And it talked about hoping her grandpa didn't have "butterfingers" so she could have a "fun dip". I was impressed, it was pretty clever.
So there's that, and we're teaching a lot of part-member families as well in the 4th ward that we're pretty excited about. We foresee big things in the near future. So it's interesting to see how the make-up of our zone has changed (our tiny little 10-missionary zone). We realized recently that there's a lot of older missionaries here, which is super unusual. I've always been in way young zones my whole mission. We've got all of the missionaries from Elder Oliver's MTC district here, and still almost all from my MTC district - weird to think I'm considered an "older" missionary now. I don't think I like it.
But life is good! One thing we've been really noticing lately is how everyone's related in these wards. There's all these main big families and they all seem to be related somehow. I guess that gives a new meaning to ward family...
Ooooh, and we had a couple pretty sweet lessons this week with Maureen (our Native American investigator) and Maribel (currently our only solid Spanish investigator/family). We met with Maureen earlier this week and we weren't exactly sure what to do with her. We've never taught anyone with that kind of background and we were just really unsure about how we were going to help her progress toward baptism, and really get her to read and pray. When we went over though, she said she had been reading and praying and that she knew the Book of Mormon was true! So we invited her to be baptized September 17th and she said yes! It was super cool, and definitely helped us realize who's really in charge here. The Lord really is the one who does all of the work, and we're just here to harvest. We also found out that she had just recently decided to stop drinking and smoking and hasn't for the past month so that's a huge leap - definitely something that can put off baptism for a while. So she called us to get a ride to church, and it was just sweet to see her make these changes and just put forth all this effort.
With Maribel it was also cool, because she's been reading and praying as well in the Book of Mormon, but hasn't committed to a baptismal date yet. Oh and by the way she is just incredible. She has said some of the most profound answers to our questions that I've ever heard. When we were talking about Lehi's vision we asked her what she thought the iron rod could possibly represent. She said she thought it could mean the word of God - the scriptures. We looked at each other and were just dumbfounded. Who would even guess that?! We were pretty impressed. And just with some of the other things, we'll ask her what they mean and she'll give us this perfect word-for-word answer, and we'll wonder if she has an answer book somewhere...that just doesn't happen - and especially not in Spanish work! So anyways, we were talking to her and we invited her to be baptized. She said she would. We invited her to get baptized the 17th, and she just said a solid yes. We were definitely not expecting it, so it took us a little while to register what she had just said. So that was cool, and yesterday she came with her whole family to all of church and it was just nice.
And apparently they're doing a media blitz down here in the Phoenix area where they're doing all of these commercials for mormon.org on all of the local stations and they're putting up all of these billboards to get people interested about it. So at the leadership training on Thursday we were trained on how to take advantage of it and how to train our members in responding to these friends that will approach them. We're all making profiles on there, and encouraging every single member to make a profile, so it should be pretty cool. The only sad part is that the website is not available in Spanish yet, and that the media thing isn't going to reach down to Yuma, because we get TV from California. But we're definitely going to take full advantage of mormon.org and I'm excited! I think it'll really help people understand us better.
So that's what's going on here! Busy as ever and loving the heat! (okay maybe not loving- that might be a stretch)
~ Elder Carlson
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