Monday, February 3, 2014

The Branch Has a New Member!!!!!!

Family!

That's right, there is a new member in the branch as of yesterday!  Mine and Elder Wells' investigator A----- is now officially a member of the Dayton Spanish Branch!  But before you get too excited, let me add a small disclaimer:  we didn't have a baptism or a confirmation this weekend....  Solve that riddle!  Ok, fine, I'll solve it for you, here goes:

So A----- was a referral from some Sister missionaries a while back.  We started teaching her, and I was amazed right from the beginning at how many spiritual experiences she had had throughout her life.  I was super excited to be teaching her, because it seemed like the Lord had touched her life so much; much, much, more than any other person I have ever taught.  After the first time we met with her, we called her a 'Platinum Investigator".  Well we continued to see her, but only every now and again because she could only meet with us once or maybe twice a week.  At the end of one visit, we left her a restoration pamphlet and invited her to read it in preparation for our next meeting.  We came back this past week, and she told us that she had read the whole thing!  And she had some other news: after reading it, she started to remember some things about her past.  She had a period of time in her life where she went through a lot of grief in a very short period of time, and because of that, she has a difficult time remembering parts of her past from that time period.  Well, one of the things that she remembered after reading about the Restoration was that she was possibly baptized in our church back in Mexico.  We told her we could find out for sure, so we got some info from her, and yesterday we sat down with the branch president and searched for her records.  And guess what!?  She was baptized in Mexico nearly 20 years ago!  So we moved her records over to the branch, and now we have another member!  Amazing!  Or at least I think so...  So yeah, this week my testimony grew so much of how involved the Lord is in every single one of our lives.  I've seen it many times so far on my mission, but I just couldn't believe how miraculous it was that she was finally found after almost 20 years...  I know the Lord has a purpose for each of us, and that he cares about each of us deeply and personally.

One more milagrito real quick.  We found some former investigators this week that had lost contact with the missionaries a few years ago.  But after the missionaries stopped coming, they continued to read in the Book of Mormon for a while, and they read over 100 pages before they stopped!  (they stopped in the Isaiah chapters...)  So we'll be teaching them again this week!

I had a few other crazy experiences this week.  We had to fight our way through some roosters to get to a door that we were going to knock. (Really the roosters just flew away when we got close, but saying that we had to fight our way through them sounds so much better.)  So yeah, I included a picture of me next to a rooster statue as a momento of that experience.

Somebody told us this week that this has been the worst winter in Ohio "since '78".  I don't have any other Ohio winters to compare it to, so I guess I believe them...

Last thing.  Don't tell anybody, but I saw about 2 minutes of the Super Bowl!  We were in the house of one of our investigators from Guatemala, and after the lesson he turned on the tv to the Super Bowl (in Spanish of course), and his wife gave us some drink she made with hot milk and oats.  We had to drink the drink she gave us real quick so as not to offend her, so we were in the same room as a tv that was playing the Super Bowl.  I didn't really watch any of it, but I did see that Denver was getting killed at halftime...

And that is all!  Have a wonderful week!  Learn a Spanish word this week, and let me know what it is next Monday!  (there's your commitment from a missionary for the week!)

Love,

Elder Foote
A Real Rooster?
Dayton Patented, What?