Hellooooooo! La la la....
Muchos saludos de la Zona Neza/Pantitlan, y el primer saludo del año 2011! Pueden creer que el año ha pasado tan rápido? Yo no!
Anywho, my companion and I have some big plans for this coming year; there's lots of improvment to do, many people to find, bring to Church, baptize, and invite to come unto Christ! This year is going to be awesome. We already started off with a really good week to help us figure out the things we need to change and improve in order to bring more fruit unto the Lord. I spent a lot of the week outside of my area, but nevertheless had some really cool experiences.
This past week we did splits with the assistants, and I finally got to actually work with Elder Walk! We realized that we hadn't taught together since the MTC, and then we realized that in the MTC we never taught real investigators. So it was fun to have the chance to actually work with him in the Lord's vineyard and gather up some fruit! We had an absolutley awesome day. We did something he calls "Power Proselyting", which consists of choosing a street in which to work (of course through much prayer), busting out the good ol' Ward Directory, marking all the families that live in that street, and going to visit them, and of course, contacting everyone in our path and knocking a few doors if we feel like it. It was really awesome, we ran into some really strange less-active members (one lady who said she left the Church because she didn't want to pray to Joseph Smith....we told her that we never pray to him, but she said that they tried to teach her some memorized prayers so she could pray to Joseph Smith. Weirrrrrd), but were also able to contact a TON of people in the street. Later Elder Walk felt the impression to knock a door, so we knocked, and an active member came out and said that that was her house. We asked if their was anyone else in her house, and she told us we could try to knock some other doors in the building. We went to the last door, knocked, and a lady named Paolina Pluma came out, we introduced ourselves, and accepted our visit. After asking a few questions, she told us that she had had some serious difficulties these past few weeks with the loss of her daughter and granddaughter. We taught her the plan of salvation, invited her to be baptized, and she accepted everything! Elder Walk and I teach in almost the exact some way, so there was plenty of flow and harmony when we taught together, and when we left the house, we were skipping down the street with our arms around each other's shoulders! Ha it was really fun, and a really good experience for me. We topped the night off with a delicious Domino's Pizza, with their supposed "new recipe" that tastes the same as the old recipe...
The next day, my companion and I got to work together in our area, and we spent most of the day contacting, to almost no avail. Most of our appointments had fallen through that day, and we were getting a little desperate at the end of the day. We decided to take some advice from the assistants and find a quiet place to pray and ask for a specific blessing. We had the goal of finding two new investigators that day, so we told the Lord where we were going to contact, and asked him to bless us with those two new investigators. After we finished, we started contacting like locos, and every time we contacted it was a usually a couple walking together. We saw a lady that was standing by her car alone, so we contacted her, and she mentioned that she had been have some difficulties, and had been praying for the answer. We testified to her, and then ther eleven year-old son came up to us and we set up an appointment to visit them the next day. Sweet!
My time is running out, and we had some other cool experiences, but I'll share them next week maybe!
Elder Budge
PS I can't believe Deanna is heading to BYU already...she'll have to introduce me to her friends once I get back! hahaha!
