THE SPIRIT AND SIMPLE TRUTH ARE A LOT MORE POWERFUL THAN ANY AMOUNT OF ELOQUENT SPEECH

Hola de nuevo de su chilenito favorito!

Well.. this last week was both very good and pretty bad all at the same time. A lot happened which means this letter will probably be somewhat unorganized and a little bit of rambling but you´ll just have to deal with it haha. First off, we had entrevistas (interviews) yesterday so President told us to have our P-day on Tuesday instead. Thus, that is why you did not receive my email yesterday.

Moving on, I will start with the bad. First of all, when I went to do the things that you asked me to do last week I found that my camera was broken!!!! AHHH!!!!!! It's weird, the screen and everything still works. Everything works except the lens! It's not cracked or anything but the screen just shows up black and when i take a picture it just turns out black. Second of all, the memory kick freezes up sometimes but luckily there is a reset button for that. But last time I reset it, it erased all of my photos!!!! and now it won't read my sd card to upload all the photos I have on it. And when it does read it, it comes up blank even though it's not. Don't worry, I checked on someone else's camera. Yeah so that's that. Sad, but what can you do? So anyways, I did not send the sd card home yet because I'm going to try to figure out what to do about this whole situation.

That was the worst of last week. Satan is also working very hard with our progressing investigators, but fortunately the spirit and us are working harder. One thing that happened that I won't go into too much detail with, is we got led into a trap, into a "discussion" with three medio loco and thirsty-for-blood seventh day adventists. One of which is there pastor who has like hundreds of scriptures memorized of which he manipulates to his cause. What happened was our investigator Nelson´s dad is a seventh day adventist and he put doubts into his head so Nelson's dad wanted to meet with his son and with us. Which was fine. But a half an hour into our meeting, in walks the whole crew and they just started monolouging basically and wouldn't even let us talk. My companion was very timid with them so I was basically left to defend by myself. Fortunately for us, the spirit and simple truth are a lot more powerful thAn any amount of eloquent speech, an arsenal of scripture and quite frankly, just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

Which leads us too the good news. We were able to resolve his doubts and we baptized Nelson on Sunday. Yayyy!!!!! My first baptism :). His testimony isn't very strong yet but it's stronger than he thinks. He is almost half way done with the Book of Mormon and I know his testimony is going to continue to grow rapidly. It was awesome to see his journey from just leaving a punk nazi life just a few months ago to a now spiritual and rapidly growing faithful member of the church.

I was nervous to do the ordinance but I managed through it without having to redo it and the spirit was very strong. The feeling afterwards is very humbling when they are thanking you from the bottom of their heart and you feel like you didn't really do anything except point them in the right direction. Because I mean the spirit converted him, not me. But anyways, we have another baptism next week (Victor) and maybe two if we can help Marcela and Marcos through the trials that are being thrown at them right now. We have some more for next cambio too when the twins get back from Uruguay.

Since things are moving along with our investigators with fechas, we have to really improve our finding efforts. We have a few good investigators that we just need to start getting to progress faster and we have a lot more work to do with the members. Street contacts are great but references from members and uniting part member families is so much more fruitful. So we have a lot of work to do here in the next couple of weeks. It's really hard to keep up with it all but I wouldnt have it any other way :).

Oh, and thank you very very much for the ridiculously generous Christmas packages grandma and papa and mom and dad. My companion and roommates are very jealous and in disbelief on basically how awesome you guys are hahah. Don't worry Mom, I´m following all of the rules and directions and am resisting the temptation to cheat haha. But sorry grandma and papa and family I'm not waiting to eat the food :D.

Well last week was very eventful but for now I think that that's a rap on the email. As always I love you lots and enjoy your Thanksgiving for me because it doesn't exist here in Chile jaja. But I'll survive and I'll eat even more than usual in honor of it (if that's even possible) Bueno, chao todos! Les quiero mucho! portase bien y haz lo justo como siempre. O a menos epero que es como siempre :)


Su favorito flaquito en el campo chilenito, Élder Harper :)