Esfuerzos

Family,

Here we are starting another week! And another month! We had a great week here in Bahìa Blanca. It is starting to get HOT. We sleep with the window open at night already and pray that the full heat of summer will wait to come for another month.

This past week we had "esfuerzos" in each of the areas in our district. Our district leader, Elder Galan, really wants each of us to be able to achieve the goal to have one baptism for every companionship in the month of November. In order to accomplish this we took two hours out of each day this past week to work in each other's areas to help find new investigators. It was a really neat experience being able to serve the other missionaries in our district. Knowing that we only had 2 hours, we went and worked really hard! It really strengthened our unity, and it helped us realize that we should view missionary work as an "esfuerzo" every day! Every day we should work just as hard as we did for those two hours in each other´s areas.

Ohh! The other day we received a really big compliment. We had Stake Conference and a young man from another ward came up to talk to us. He said, "Hey, thanks for having that family night with that family the other week." At first it took a second to figure out what he was talking about. Then we remembered the familia that we taught. They invited us over for lunch one Sunday and we felt prompted to teach them about Family History work. It seemed really weird at first because we normally focus on the Restoration or the Plan of Salvation. For some background information: the dad is the only member, his wife is super Catholic, and they have three kids. Missionaries have worked with this family before, but since the mom is so Catholic, they aren't progressing as investigators.

Yet as we continued talking to this young man he told us that he talked to the oldest daughter the other night. He helped her set up an account on familysearch.org and she is doing a ton of family history work. She is also planning to travel to go visit her grandma to get more information about her family history! AND! She's reading the Book of Mormon and wants to learn more about the Church. She hasn't told anyone about it yet other than this guy because she knows her mom won't be too thrilled, so she wants to know for sure whether she wants to get baptized and then she'll contact us.

Wow. WOW! That was a neat paycheck for us to hear that we really must have been following the Spirit when we chose to teach that family about family history because it really impacted her!

Some other fun news was that since this Sunday was Stake Conference I got to see the members from Pigüè! It made me so happy to see them again! And it was really fun because I could see how much I have progressed. I can actually speak Spanish now! haha

Well family, I love you. Thank you for all you do! I hope you have a wonderful week, y nos vemos el Lunes que viene!!

-Hermana Vawdrey