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Week #71: Tamaulipas 1.1 - XII - Week 15

This week was a pretty good week. As I said this last week, the Mexico Area Presidency wants us to be teaching more lessons, and in order to do that the mission wants us to cut our lessons up, make them shorter but more powerful, and get a lot more people in the teaching and baptismal pools. So, we tried to work hard this week, teach little lessons, inviting people to be baptized, etc.

It went pretty well. We´re on our way. This week we taugth 27 lessons, as compared to 20 last week. Hopefully we can keep going and have a really good rhythm in the work. We were able to teach some new investigators, and we have hopes for some baptisms in the next two months with those that we already know.

One such person is Liz. She is 20 years old. We contacted her in the street, and we weren´t able to consistently visit and teach her, so her baptismal date fell through. We actually gave up on visiting her, because she was going to leave for school. But, we saw her, and got back in contact. Then, she came to Church! So, we set up an appointment to see her on Friday. I was on intercambios with Elder Soto, so he and I taught the lesson, and we asked how she felt. She sounded really excited, and sure, that the Church and Book of Mormon are true, and she confidently accepted the baptismal invitation. Elder Soto was really excited, said that she was "Escogidísimo" (very chosen). It was pretty cool. We´re hoping that she´ll be ready by March 29th.

I wrote about our intercambio in my letter to President Bird: "The Zone Leaders did intercambios with us on Friday, and Elder Soto came with me to the area. We had a golden day - we taught 7 lessons, and two people accepted baptismal dates. It was a full day, and very good. One of those lessons was actually by Elder Carbajal and I before the intercambio. We need to get to the point where every day is like that. One thing I really liked from the intercambio was the audacity and faith of Elder Soto. In his prayer before we left to work, he prayed to see miracles, and we had a miracle day. That was pretty great."

We´ve got some other people in the works right now. One is named Juan Sánchez. We met some new families, and one of them seems like they could progress and end up being baptized too. We´re going to keep working with them and working hard in the area.

In other news, the ward should be getting two more missionaries this transfer (March 18th). That means that there will be three companionships, and SIX missionaries in the ward Tamaulipas. That will be pretty cool, and the work will keep moving forwrad. We´ll be able to find more and more people, teach more lessons, focus on a smaller area, and it´ll be great stuff. We found out Tuesday night.

So, life has been pretty good this week. Thanks to everyone who has written me, shared their testimony with me, or who has prayed for me and the work. Please pray that we might be able to continue in this path, working towards our goals of teaching many lessons, and having many baptisms. Please pray that our studies will be effective, and strengthen us.

I´ve felt pretty good this week. I´m going to keep focusing my studies, my prayers, and my actions on the work and the gospel. It should be good. I love you all and wish you well. Posted by Tom Erekson at 12:14 PM