Dear Family and Friends, 7/23/2012
So nice to see those awesome pictures from trek! Sounds like you had many wonderful experiences and I can't wait to hear more about them. So to answer some of the questions from dads letter. I actually haven't rode my bike yet haha because Elder Porter is the District Leader so we are blessed with a car. So nice since it tends to be over 100 most of the time. The Language is going pretty good, most of our lessons we teach in English though...bummer. Every once in a while we will teach someone in Spanish and that's always fun. For some reason when I speak Spanish I feel like more of a Missionary. But ya Spanish is coming along great. Elder Porter is fluent so that helps a lot because he can teach me basically everything I will need to know. Hopefully before I go down south to the valley I will be fluent so I can teach effectively.
So quite a bit has happened this week! Since I am the companion of the D.L. I have to go on exchanges with other Elders almost once every week. But since we got a little behind on exchanges, so I had to go twice. From Tuesday morning to late Wednesday night I was with the Zone Leader Elder Brown. He taught me a lot about how to begin teaching and getting to know your investigator so you can teach to their needs. Something cool that he told me is that I am the only new Missionary above the border patrol check line. The area that I am in has been struggling and hadn't baptized in over 6 months. I feel like it truly was revelation that I was sent here. We plan to baptize 12 wonderful people in August and 3 this weekend! Elder Porter and I make a great team and I think we are really turning this area around. Saturday I went up to this town called Alice and spent the Day with Elder Penaloza. He and his companion had been struggling so I helped him implement some finding techniques that we had been using in our area so hopefully that helps them out.
We struggled this week finding people and it was really hard to not get discouraged, haha we had a ton of doors slammed in our face. Most of the time it is because people think we are Jehovah's Witnesses' and well...they are kinda crazy so people don't really like them. So it was a long week but Sunday really made up for it. We extended 4 baptismal commitments to solid people that we had found throughout the week that didn't seem interested but out of no where they just called us up. One of them was this 20 yr. old girl named Kristen. Shes so golden!!! She explained to us that her parents want her to get her baby baptized in the Catholic church. She told us that she kept feeling that is was wrong and she had been praying for help. She said only a few minutes after the prayer we knocked on her door. haha crazy how things work out. Anyways she is getting baptized in a few weeks and is really eager to attend church to learn about how to become closer to Christ.
Love the Mission! The Gospel is so wonderful and is applicable to everyone who is willing to change. Everything is just going perfect! Miss you all and hope you are enjoying your summer as much as me haha! See ya in a few :)
Elder Sanderson
p.s. hey mom could you send me a book sometime. Its called the little missionary quote book. its small and I believe has the angel Moroni on it. Thanks
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