Elder Andrew Peña:

Hello everybody! Life is great, the mission is great! We had a wonderful week! It was different and exciting and crazy things happened!! Monday of last week we had a lesson cancel with an investigator and set it up for tonight at 8:00 hopefully they will be there! On Tuesday we had what they call and have like once a year which is District leader Council! It was with all the district leaders in our zone and two other zones and with all the zone leaders and president and the assistants! We just had a council for some of the newer district leaders and questions were asked and things that are important to know and pretty much just changing the responsibilities of the district leader and helping them understand them! It was for a couple of hours and it was down in Merced! It was really good. Later that day we had a dinner scheduled with a less active family and did not have their phone number to call and confirm. When we got to their house they had forgotten and so we just set dinner up for another day! So we didn't eat breakfast and we had the council from 10 till like 2 and they usually bring lunch but they didn't this time and so we drove back to Modesto which was like an hour and a half and we just went and had a couple pieces of bread and candy and water and then went out for dinner. Then that got cancelled so really we didn't eat at all that day, but we taught a lot!!!:) We also had a good lesson that night with a less active member in our singles branch. We taught her at the branch president's home and she is struggling with her testimony and she wants to take the lessons for us to help her with that. It was a powerful lesson and she seems very excited to read and pray and she started crying too, it was good! Wednesday we had a lot to plan for so we planned for a couple of hours and a couple of our appointments fell through. We planned for our " Zone meeting " which we had on Thursday. What we did was made a huge activity with our entire zone and role played a companionship, teaching investigators with concerns and in order to get them baptized they had to help them over come their concern. We had some missionaries study from Preach My Gospel our " mission training plan " to help the missionaries help the investigator overcome their concern and I was able to be an investigator! It was fun and I learned a lot! Also to make our week even better on Thursday we went over to an investigators home and he came out way drunk and started yelling at us! Immediately a scripture came to my mind and I was going to share it and my companion started talking and the drunk guy went off on my companion for not being smart and saying he talks to much and he tries to think to much instead of using his feelings. To make a long story short he was very, very cruel to my companion and to make it weirder we were able to soft commit him to baptism and he told us he wanted to get baptized. After we were done we drove away and pulled over and my companion had a break down so we read some scriptures and talked and it turned out to be a quite eventful day with a lot of learning experiences. To make it even better after that I noticed it was the 16th of April! So if you could say I had a memorable 1 year mark! After that we had dinner we had pizza and buffalo wings that night. Friday we weekly planned. We had a couple of appointments with some less active members and invited them out to church! We are still trying to figure out their situation. We think that two of the kids are not baptized so that will be good. Saturday was a lot of fun. We have an investigator who is a quadriplegic and we tried to figure out a way to get him from his house to the church to do a little tour. Well something we thought would take 2 hours took about 3. We had a member and a truck come to his house and we picked Mike out of his chair into the truck and put the chair in the back of the truck. His son helped us load him up and then when we got to the church it was a little harder. I was able to pick Mike up and move him to his wheel chair and sweated a lot due to the hot weather!!! But we were able to go and look at all the pictures and sing a couple hymns and then went in the chapel and sat in there quietly! It was awesome! Sunday we did a baptismal interview for a girl who is 13 who read the Book of Mormon in ten hours!!! Holy cow that was awesome! She made a mistake on thinking that she was to read from the introduction to 3 Nephi chapter 11 and she did that in 4 hours and then a couple days later she just sat down again and said I'm just going to finish it and 6 hours later she finished! If that's not a testimony builder I don't know what is! So she was baptized yesterday and we did the regular Sunday of two sacrament meetings and visiting some less active members and setting up a few appointments for the week! That was my week. It was very eventful and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have it! I hope you all have a wonderful week and if it's not eventful then make it! " your future is only as bright as your faith. " I love my mission and I love you all! I hope to hear from you all again! Love Elder Peña