Week 21, I love to see the temple

Hola Familia!

We had tons of great experiences this week! First, Hermana Cadenas and I were able to go to the temple! One of our recent converts is preparing for a mission so even thought the temple is not with in our mission boundaries, we received special permission to go with her. (For those non-mormons reading my blog, we make covenants in the temple, similar to covenants made at baptism.)  It’s a really exciting time! We went with a couple other sistesr to support and help her. The temple is such a sacred place and I love it. The whole week Hermana Cadenas and I were singing the primary song "I love to see the Temple." It is such a place of learning, comfort, enlightenment and peace, who wouldn't love that?  Also a side benefit of going is the distribution store next door. Our Mission doesn’t have a church book store or anything cool like that so the temple is the only place where we can buy "churchy" things! I bought  videos to share with our investigators and rings with the "CTR" (choose the right) logo on them and several other things to help with our teachings. But the day just kept getting better because we also stopped in Jockey Plaza. It was like entering America and hallelujah, there was a Starbucks so of course I ate there for lunch! Yummy! So over all the temple trip was a great experience. We are so lucky that the temple is somewhat close to us. I read an article in the Liahona magazine about a little old lady who traveled from Mexico all the way to Salt Lake City by BUS to go to the temple. She didn’t know any English except for the word apple so she ate apples the whole way there and back. Its kind of a funny story but I'm just thankful that I have a temple close by and that I can say more than apple in Spanish.

This week was also our zone leader, Elder Moody's birthday!  We threw him a little birthday party with cake, pizza and a  movie! The mission is all about service and the people we teach  but the missionaries can have fun too!!

We have two new awesome families that we are working with and they love us! Family O absolutely adore us and they invite us over nearly everyday. The Dad and Mom are not members yet because they need to be married first, but their sons J and M are baptized and their daughter Rosa was baptized this week.Yay! We are in the process of looking for their birth certificates so the dad and mom can be married. The other day when Hermana Cadenas and I had to leave Rosa the daughter would not let go of us! She just held us in a hug! And then when we finally got out the door she chased us down the street trying to get us to come back. She is a spicey and spunky little girl, you can't help but love her. I'm so proud of her decision to be baptized!

The baptism.

Sooo we planned everything the best we could but we always know that there are going to be problems. The baptism was at 7. We were at the church filling up the font at 5! Unfortunately we couldn't get the hot water going but we did manage to fill it with cold water. Rosa arrived in her beautiful little purple dress we had cookies, everything was ready to go! We ran back to our room to get the baptism clothes for President Erickson! Because President Erikson was preforming the baptism. When we picked up baptism clothes we found that they were too small for him and the suit didn’t have a zipper!!! Oh my goodness what the heck were we going to do? We couldn't give the president a jump suit that was too small and had a missing zipper! We started running around looking for other baptismal clothes but we had no luck! We took the jump suit to our penchinista who luckily makes jackets and had tons of zippers. But even when she tried to put a zipper on the zipper wouldn't stay closed. At this point it was already 7.30 and there was nothing we could do! We grabbed some safety pins and ran to the baptism! My companion even fell while we were running and busted up her knees pretty bad! But anyways we gave the jumpsuit to president and to say the least he was not happy. He came out with the jumpsuit on, and to be honest I couldn't help but laugh! He couldn't sit down because it was too small and if he did I'm pretty sure all the pins would have come undone! It was soooo bad, really it was awful, but at least it was funny at the same time. Besides the baptismal clothes everything was perfect! Rosa was baptized the young women came and brought a cake they had just made for their activity. We had great testimonies and everyone was happy! This baptism just reminded me that all the other things aren’t important, in all honesty the only thing that is important is that Rosa can become a member of the church and start her new life. This is the only thing that matters. I really do love this family.

Sunday

Sunday was another great day! I gave a talk in church about the importance of the Book of Mormon in helping people be truly converted to the gospel It went really well. I wrote the whole thing in Spanish by myself and it was actually pretty good! We had another baptism after church and this one went so beautifully. This family are recent converts to the church. R and M were baptized when I first entered the area. They are new, but they are such strong members of the church. This is the family that we helped to move their house a couple of months ago, literally we moved the house.… Im pretty sure I sent pictures!  This family is ROCK ON. M was able to baptize his son S. As soon as S came out of the water R, S's little brother, ran up to the baptismal font almost jumped over the wall and yelled [Hermano Como Esta![ It was pretty dang cute how much his brother looks up to him.  After the baptism S bore his testimony. I don’t have eloquent enough words to describe how beautiful this 8 year olds testimony was. He spoke for about a 10 minutes, quoted scriptures by heart, shared the story of Christ walking on water and how we need to have faith. He related the story of how he was first introduced into the church. It was beautiful and came right from his heart. Everyone in the room was beyond impressed, the bishop was crying, the primary president was crying and so was nearly everyone in the room. I love this story that he shared. He was walking in the streets with his mom when they came across the missionaries. S ran up to the missionaries with a question. His question was [Who created God?] and after that they started to teach his family and now they are all strong members of the church.

Over all everything has been going pretty great I'm really happy with the baptisms and with the work that we are doing.

Love you all!

Hermana Huish