Dear Family and Friends!
Wow, well just about all of you mentioned in your letters today, yes I only have 1 month left in my mission. Even though inside I can't get myself to wrap my brain around the concept. I know that everything has to come to an end!
Now it's the last round and I'm stoked to give it my all! Winter has fully kicked in (sorry mom, it might be pretty cold here for ya) but it's game time!
So this week started off with a lot of fire, I guess you could say coming from President. On Tuesday we had consejo de guerra with him and he sure let us feel the pressure of the importance of this month. Sadly, the week before the mission only baptized 5 people in the whole entire mission. One of them being our baptism. President told us that that has never happened! So he was freaking out a little bit. He even called the district leaders to come to the meeting later on and gave a really clear vision for all of us to achieve.
So we left the meeting pumped and ran straight to Erlipper's house, who we taught and taught a lot about what is Fe and how he really needs to show it. After our powerful lesson about faith, we invited him to get baptized and he accepted for the 18th! WOO HOO por fin! He finally accepted a baptism date! But the only down side is that he couldn't attend church yesterday and since he still needs one more attendance at church to get baptized, we are gonna pass by tomorrow to put a fecha with him for the 25th! Please pray for him that he will be able to be baptized that day! President is putting a lot of pressure in that everyone baptizes this month. And even though we baptized Liceth in the first week of this month, we know that we can show a bigger example to keep baptizing more and more!
Then the next day we passed by Gabriel who has received most of the lessons now and he is SOO close to getting baptized! Aww, we taught the Word of Wisdom and he has been able to stop drinking now, but he has a pretty strong addiction to smoking. He usually smoked about a pack full of cigarettes at least every day. But we were able to set some goals with him on Tuesday to start dropping one cigarette every day. We weren't able to pass by much during the week, but we passed by Saturday and he couldn't quite meet up with the goals, but he has dropped down to only smoke 4 a day which is still a huge progress! We taught him on Saturday about the importance of the Holy Ghost in our lives and how we need to endure to the end. We challenged him to get baptized but he doesn't feel like he is ready. He wants to get baptized but doesn't feel like he's prepared at all and still needs help with his smoking problem and doesn't want to fail after getting baptized. We explained about the sacrament and more of the confirmation of the Holy Ghost but he was being a little stubborn.
Really his whole family wants him to get baptized and he acts as if he is going to get baptized, but he just puts himself in a stubborn mode sometimes and sometimes it bugs the crap out of me! Aww! Ha ha, we are going to have a FHE with the Cruz family who are really good friends with them and we are hoping that he will get baptized this weekend or the next one with Erlipper!
Other than that the Lord was really merciful with our zone this past week. Our zone hasn't been progressing a whole lot. Month for month the only ones to baptized is us. We have tried so many things to try out for our zone, but it has seems that nothing has happened. Elder Daniel and I both decided that we needed to focus on talking with EVERYONE. We realized that the zone is barely finding any new investigators and obviously if we aren't finding, we aren't teaching, so we aren't baptizing! So we excited the zone this week to "open their mouths" and told them that if they wanted to be obedient we have to! We challenged the zone to talk with everyone possible! And this week there was a big rainstorm that started Friday night and lasted till Sunday afternoon. In which during the storm a lot of the companionships just stayed out in the streets getting wet because a lot of their appointments had fallen through.
But just by all of us opening our mouths the Lord truly did put people in our path. In our sector we were able to find 12 news! Something that we haven't been able to achieve for a long time. And as a zone we were able to find almost 70 news! We we were averaging achieving only like 25 a week. So that boosted a lot of the missionaries excitement and now it's just time to baptized them! The best part! Woo hoo!
Really, it was amazing to see how many tender mercies happened to us as we were walking in the street and so many families let us in. There was one case where we were able to find 4 news just by going into one pasaje in our sector, entered and taught in the first house, when we finished, we asked them for referencias, and they told us to talk to their neighbors, so we did! And we repeated that process for the first 4 houses! Ha ha, it was amazing! Enter, teach, ask for referencias, and we were able to find a lot of news! IT was amazing!
Truly the Lord is preparing a lot for us for the second half of this transfer. Even though it was a little slow this first couple weeks for the rest of the mission and mostly everyone, I know we are setting the building blocks for a lot of future baptisms for the end of this transfer and for the month of Agost!
We are really focused on baptizing Erlipper and Gabriel since they are the only ones that could get baptized this month. We are pumped to see what miracles we will be able to see for the rest of this month!
I love this work and I know miracles exist!
Love you all!
Elder Cowan
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