"I'm happier"

Dear everyone,

First of all, pretty funny that you got to help out with the zone conference lunch. It's weird how things are so similar everywhere in the church. I kind of thought that was just a Colorado thing to have zone conference lunch provided by the stake, but yeah that's totally a thing we do here too. We also always sing to the sisters that made and served the lunch. Our song is just straight up the "Army of Helaman" without any changed lyrics except that at the end after the "to bring the world his truth" we say "and thank you for the food." So anyway we're basically pretty cool I think is how that works.

This week was pretty great for us. The biggest, most awesome thing, was that our investigator was baptized and confirmed! It was really, really awesome. There was kind of a little bit of stress leading up to it, not being able to find the baptismal clothing, and some other craziness, but as soon as the baptismal service started, it was just great. The first counselor in the bishopric did the actual baptism, and our bishop confirmed her yesterday, so that was pretty cool. I got to give a talk about the gift of the Holy Ghost at the actual baptism--I think that was the first time I've actually given a written talk in Spanish here. I mean, I've borne my testimony plenty of times, and done some other like impromptu stuff, but in terms of a talk talk, that was the first time. The whole time the Spirit was just super strong. It was really just amazing to see how much she's changed, how much she wants to do the right thing. As we've been teaching her, she's been talking about how much different she feels than before. And then after she was baptized, we were just telling her how happy we were for her, and she just told us "I'm happier." And you know that just felt so awesome. It really is an amazing experience to see someone change so much. We talked to her yesterday after she received the Holy Ghost, and she just told us that she felt so good. Leading up to her baptism she was feeling kind of nervous, but she said that she just felt completely calm and great. So basically I just can't come up with enough ways of saying that it is just completely great to be a missionary.

Another pretty cool experience came from a girl we've been helping to reactivate. Basically she's gone from completely not active when we got here to completely active now. I've mentioned her before, because she's really cool basically. Something really awesome is that most of her family is either less-active or nonmembers, it's just her and her mom that are going to church right now. Her Mom told us that her Dad is like really not friendly towards the church, and actually tried to get her to stop going to church. But apparently her reaction to that was a "He[ck] no!" So basically when I heard that I laughed a lot and fist-bumped her :).

 

And then after the baptismal service we had the ward Christmas party which was pretty good too. Had some weird dessert thing where you basically just make a really crispy (not burnt, not sure exactly how that works) tortilla, and then completely cover it in cinnamon sugar. That was really good. And of course, lately we've been singing a lot of Christmas carols at basically any meeting we go to ever. So that's a lot of fun.

Things are going great. We're finally being able to get into the Christmas spirit now that it's finally started to snow and it's gotten below 40 degrees outside. I hope everything's going well with you all. I don't have details about Christmas calls/skyping yet, but I'll obviously make sure to make that happen next Monday.

 

Love you all!

Peter

 

P.s. I don't have the classic "in baptismal clothing" picture because things were a little crazy, but here's a picture we took during the ward Christmas party.