Week 56

Buenos Dias Mis Seres Queridos

Whoa. When I typed Transfer 9 in the subject line...that was weird. When did this happen?! I wrote a letter to my trainer, Hermana Blanco, this morning and mentioned, "Remember when I would tease you all the time because you were going home soon? Yeah...now my trainee does the same thing every time I see her. I deserve that I guess." This transfer I received my "death dot", meaning that my picture that is on President Hansen's transfer board now has an orange dot with a 3 on it, because I only have 3 transfers left. So, basically all of the missionaries in my zone have made comments about how I am not officially a "dying missionary". Boo.

Enough of that nonsense. This week was AMAZING. We received so many blessings from the Lord this week as we strive for obedience with exactness. We found and began teaching 6 new investigators this week! The mission standard is 4 a week, but we have been struggling with the goal for a while, BUT this week we found 6, and they are all so solid and just amazing. We also found several members of the church this week while knocking doors who haven't been to church in 10+ years because when they moved here from other countries they didn't speak english and couldn't find the chapel, crazy! We also tried out this idea I had heard from some Elders in another zone called "zebra tracting". On saturday we went on a mini exchange with the english sister missionaries who happen to cover part of our area and we went and knocked doors for an hour. It was really neat to do because the streets we had chosen had an equal amount of english and spanish speakers, so I would talked to all of the spanish speakers and Sister Layton, the english missionary, spoke to the english ones. It was very successful and each companion found a new investigator from it. We ended up talking to this guy and I taught him a lesson about prophets and the restoration in front of his garage and at the end he asked me why the other missionary doesn't talk and I explained that she doesn't speak spanish. His response was, "Well I speak both languages! You should have said something! Haha!" He was so nice, and happens to be our new investigator, we are going to go teach him and his family next saturday, woo hoo!

Jose and Elizabeth are doing SO good! They were really struggling to understand why it is important to keep the sabbath day holy, especially because they are struggling financially and really need to work on sunday. BUT, we went over this week and were talking about repentance and while we were teaching Jose said, "So, this week I decided that I am not going to work on sundays, is that repentance?" I couldn't even believe what he had just said, and asked him to repeat it just to make sure, and once he confirmed what he had said my companion and I were both in tears. They are SO amazing, I have never met people with such faith and trust in the Lord. Jose told us that while he was working last sunday he was just having a hard time focusing and everything seem to go wrong, and it reminded him of when we talked about the Tower of Babel and how the Lord confounded the languages there so the people would stop building the tower. He said the Lord must not want him to work on sundays because he can't work effectively those days. Wow. I love them so much! They also said they didn't want us to have to leave so early, we always teach them right before our curfew, and suggested that we just move into their son's old bedroom, haha. I love being a missionary, I really wonder if there is any joy greater than this.

Love, Hermana Taets