July 26, 2011 - Letter Home

Miracles Before the End


stephanie, priscila, junior, miracle, jacqueline e fam, zone conference,

3rd to last e-mail. :) 
It's hard to not think about that. This week went well, and, many thanks to Elder Bryant, we're running running running to find more people and to get the people we have to baptism. I'm very happy to be ending my mission this way... :) 
I hope to keep up the speed after I get home too. We had an awesome zone conference on wednesday where I got to see a lot of people from my CTM group, and also see Elder Carroll and Elder Persinger - my growing stepsons... :) again. It was awesome. I hardly ate anything in our huge and expensive lunch cause I was busy catching up with all my buddies. I discovered that a bunch of guys from my group'll be attending UVU with me after the mish as well. I'm especially excited to be able to study with Elder Anderson, Feller, and Gibby there. :) I love those guys. We made a bunch of after-mission plans which made me a little trunky at the time but I'm over it now. :P 
Our Conference was with Seventy Elder Itesorio, and was very spiritual and talked about a bunch of new teaching techniques to improve the work. Very enlightening.

We have a nice little group of progressing investigators here, and people are finally starting to go to church every week (unlike in the 3 months when I arrived here) I am super excited for Stephanie, who's accepted baptism for next month and participated in a Young Women's activity this week. And even though Priscila was sick this week and couldn't go to church, she's progressing and seeming to start to "get it". I hope and believe that I will be able to see her baptized. We've been teaching a couple other cool families, Jacqueline and Fabio, and Paulo and Juliana, and Marcelo and Maria. It's been good to be able to not JUST find, but also be teaching alot.

The other night we had a special experience. It's 8:30, and we finished teaching Jacqueline and Fabio, but they were worried about Everton, who had had some problems and hadn't come home yet. We agreed to look around the neighborhood for him. We walked around for half and hour, it's cold, it was a long day, and no one was on the streets. We started walking towards home and instead of going home at 9:00, Elder Bryant insists that we keep walking around looking for Everton. I wanted to just tell him to give up because Everton could be anywhere, and there was probably nothing we could do. We walk around a bit more, come back to our street, but Elder Bryant doesn't let me turn and go home. I want to humor him (little greeny optimist that he is), so we walk down a side street. We get to the end of the street and notice an alleyway that I had never known existed, even though we knocked all the doors of that street one night. We walk to the end of the alley, it's a dead end, and so we start walking back. Suddenly a young women runs out of her house, we can see a large family inside. She's all smiling, and I give a big friendly hello, and I suppose Elder Bryant thought she was a member I hadn't told him about, so we start talking, and she asks for us to come back and talk to her family about the church. We mark a visit, and then I ask her how she knew about the church. She said she doesn't know anything about our church. I ask her how long ago she's seen the missionaries. She doesn't know anything about the missionaries. I ask her if she'd ever SEEN the missionaries. Nope. She says she just saw us walking down the street, after 9:00 at night, and had a feeling that she needed to invite us in so we could talk to her family about their church. Well, we shared a quick message about Jesus Christ and the family, and not wanting to spoil a good thing, booked it out of there. More news to come on her, Andressa, and her family, for sure. I'm absolutely certain that's the elect family we've been praying for. Stuff like Andressa running out to meet us in the cold empty night NEVER NEVER happens. Man, I was pretty astonished after that. Very cool.

So, there will be miracles before the end. I am so thankful that God remembered his cold, tired Elder Carpenter to send him a little sign that He's still in this.

Anyway, I love you all bunches! Have a great week! Keep the faith burning!

Love love love,
Elder Con