Dear Family,
This has been a great week here in Donna, with good progress for our investigators around the board. At the moment, we have Hector, and Cindy and her two kids, Cleopatra and Cesar. Both are making good progress towards baptism. Hector had a bit of a delay with his baptism, since we were unable to meet with him very much this past week. However, we finally were able to sit down with him, discuss his progress, and start planning things for his baptism. My companion, Elder Navarro will be performing the baptism. I'll be giving a talk on baptism. Edgar Cabrera, a member in the ward who has done a great job of fellowshipping Hector will give a talk on the Holy Ghost.
We went over the baptismal interview questions already with Hector. Every thing seems to be taken care of and understood. Everything is going well and barring some random incident, he should be getting baptized this Sunday. Teaching him has been a really interesting experience because he understands a lot and always wants to know exactly why things are the way they are. The big turning point in his conversion, I think, is when he took his Book of Mormon one night, walked around his neighborhood, sat down in a garden and prayed to know if it was true. God answered his prayer and from then on he was able to move forward, building his testimony and understanding.
Cindy and her two kids are progressing as golden investigators, which is awesome. The first time we taught Cindy, we extended a baptismal date to her, which she turned down. We were unable to figure out why. However, after teaching her a bit more and getting to know her better, we found out that three other members of her family, including her parents, are members of the Church. This, I think, really helped her to have a good experience and connection with the Gospel. This last week we again extended the invitation to be baptized. This time, she accepted. We encouraged her to prepare herself for baptism in mid December, and she seems excited for that. She was excited enough about her baptism that she called her parents, who now live in Missouri, and invited them to attend. They are now coming down a bit before Christmas to see their daughter and her children get baptized into the Lord's Church.
It is always exciting and reassuring when someone invites their parents to their baptism. It lets you know that they're ready for it if they invite someone else to come. On a random note, her kid, Cesar, is maybe one of the funniest kids I've met. he's nine years old and always manages to do something funny during our lessons. For example, during our lesson about the Restoration, we explained that Joseph Smith went into a grove of trees to pray and know which church was true. When he prayed, God and Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him that he was going to restore the Lord's Church to the earth. After we explained this, Cesar interrupted one of us and blurted out, "Geez, what kind of tree do you have to pray under to get a vision like that?" At that point my companion and I started laughing and his mom explained that it wasn't where you prayed, but how you prayed, with faith and real intent.
So, all has been well here in Donna. We're having a bit of trouble finding new people to teach. This makes things a big difficult because soon we will have Hector moving out of our teaching pool. But I'm confident that the Lord will lead us to someone who is prepared to hear and follow the message of His restored Gospel.
I'm glad to hear that everything is going well at home with callings, sharing food and the like. Mom's story about Jenny Oaks Baker was interesting because she actually gave a short series of talks and played a number of songs for us at a devotional in the MTC. I'm not sure I ever wrote home about that, but I have heard her play. I'm glad you had the opportunity to hear her too. She's an amazing violinist. She's almost as good as Marsali, but I should be careful to say that without too much Arlington Ward pride.
I would suggest to Uncle Marty and Aunt Liz to show Toy Story 3 to their missionaries at Thanksgiving. How to Train Your Dragon was a great movie, but Toy Story is such a classic. I'd hate to have any missionaries miss out on that for any longer than they have to. I'm not sure what we're going to do for Thanksgiving here, probably just eat with a member family or something. Donna is struggling in the way of member families who feed the missionaries dinner. We have one lunch appointment once a week in Donna, and then we have one other dinner and lunch appointment during the week, but it's actually over in Weslaco's area. As far as a Thanksgiving package goes, I'll be excited for whatever Mom can send me. In answer to her question, yes, we do have an oven in our apartment. I'll send a picture of me with my cowboy boots and other stuff next week.
I hope everything continues going well for the family and I hope that Mel improves and everything goes all right! I can't wait to hear more from you all next week!
Love,
Elder Wood
