One More Week

We are about a week away, so this last email was short.  Lloyd has two baptisms scheduled for this Saturday, so he's going out with a bang.  He's still working hard and doing well.  He's complaining about walking up and down the hills so much that his feet and legs hurt.  But he's doing well.

We are having an open house for him on Saturday, June 25, from 6-8.  Come on over and say hello to him.  He'll be speaking in church the next day.  Our church is at 10:30 in the Reston building, right off of Fairfax County Parkway. 

Last Fast and Testimony Meeting

Well, I am doing really well. I don’t know if you experienced it on the mission, but sometimes you get a little complacent with the spirit, kind of not always elevating the feeling of the spirit, kind of feeling normal. Well, thankfully, this Sunday was fast Sunday, and it went really well. I fasted (wow, I know), and I got to give my testimony, it was really awesome. Since it was my last fast and testimony meeting in Panama, I felt that I had to share. So it was really awesome. Then, we went and taught a less active, because he had been reactivating, but has since fallen away, he is 16, and is the only one of his family who is a little bit active. So we went and were talking to him, and it was really... normal. We were trying to reach him, but he was talking about how other people receive all the blessings, even if they don’t go to church, and he feels that he isn’t receiving any blessings. Well, we weren’t really reaching him, nothing that we were saying was really making an impact, it was always followed by him saying "but..". So I had the impression of sharing with him the last talk by McConkie, about the healing power of Gethsemane. It was really awesome. He was a little distracted in the beginning, but then he was just listening to the talk. Afterwards, we went outside, and he was almost crying, and so was my companion, because this is the talk that gave my companion his testimony. And the spirit was really strong, and it was awesome. So we told him to pray as soon as we left, and he would know that God was listening to him. It was really awesome.

And on Saturday we had a baptism, a lady named Argelis, she is really awesome. She lives on the other side of a mountain, kinda, and still comes to church. She lives in a plywood house, and always wants to go church, it’s awesome. And yesterday, well, one of our baptisms, so a recent convert, was taken to jail because he was hanging out with his idiot friends huffing glue, apparently, and was taken to jail. He got out today, so yeahhhhh. But he says he wasn’t huffing glue. So, we are trusting him. And my companion told me that the recent converts’ family are drug dealers, sooooooo. Yeah. Which is weird, because they live in a tiiiinyyyy house. And we were supposed to have another baptism, but the lady disappeared for four days. Well, apparently she went off drinking and went to partttaaayyy. Apparently this is the first time she has had alcohol. So we had to postpone her baptism for my last Saturday here. She looks like she wants to repent, though, so that is a good sign.

Everything is going good, we are working hard, and tomorrow we are going to the temple, I am going to buy a book of Mormon in Portuguese, because I am thinking of after the mission trying to learn it, because it is so close to Spanish, and I heard that there is a great app called duolingo which is apparently really good for learning languages. So yup!