Elder Andrew Peña

November 30, 2009

This week was great! It went by super fast! And of course Thanksgiving was this Thursday! It went really well! We ate at about 2:00 and ate A LOT! We ate at the Thompson's home, they have 4kids. One who is 20, one who is 14 and twins who are 12. They fed us like we were kings! We were asked to do our weekly planning on Thursday this week instead of on Friday so that is what we did until about 2:00. We had a lesson with Ricky, Robert and Dominque Moore who will be baptized on the 12th of this month! We had dinner at the Moore's and it was good! We only taught two lessons that day from the time we had our planning session in the afternoon and our dinner appointment! As far as it went for missionary work it was zero! But that is ok! The turkey was really good! Along with the Idaho potatoes!;) We taught two lessons in a members home this week and we taught 23 quality lessons. We found a new person to teach, her name is Janelle and she is married to a less active that is coming back to church who we have been playing basketball with from 6 to 7 in the morning about 2 or 3 times a week! Tonight we will invite her to be baptized along with Rudy, Reyna and Alfredo! So those lessons shall go well! Pray for us and them! Wednesday I was on an exchange with Elder Kramer, one of the assistants, and it was really good! We had a couple of really good lessons that day and we did two church tours and invited them to be baptized and we were able to find out a lot of concerns that were holding them back! It was really a neat experience! Saturday we were able to find Dayunie who was someone that we had planned on being baptized about a month ago and we talked with her and her family and she was thinking about being baptized in December and we have a lesson with her on Tuesday so hopefully this week we can have 10 people with a baptismal date! Right now we have 5 but it will likely be 7 by the end of the week! So people are being prepared! And thank you for your prayers in helping us accomplish our goals! We had 5 investigators at church and 2 of them have baptismal date. There were 2 new investigators that have never been before that came! And then Dayunie hasn't been for like a month and she came with her family! So it was really good! We saw a lot of success as a zone! We set a goal to have 72 member present lessons! Our average from the last like 6 months is about 50 or so and we just fell short. We had 70 member present lessons! Our own companionship had a goal of 7and we got 8 but we could have gotten 10 so we just fell short as a zone! It was really good! As a mission we have 749 people that have been baptized and we have 236 individuals with a baptismal date! Usually 1/3 of the baptismal dates get baptized. That is usually worldwide, but as a mission I think we do a little better than that! That was pretty much my week! My companion and I gave talks in sacrament meeting and my companion gave a great talk on adversity and opposition. It was a really good talk! While I talked on obedience it seemed to me as the topics ran together! It was good! I can't believe how fast this month went by! We will have a lot of good lessons this week with our investigators! Hopefully we will be able to have a few more with a baptismal date! Today we have our zone activity. We are either going to play dodge ball or ultimate Frisbee and we get to eat a lot of pizza and cookies! Haha, our zone has 10 companionships in it! So it will be a good dodge ball or Frisbee game! Haha, something that I am pondering about latley and thinking about is our potential to become more like God! And the intelligence and the knowledge we obtain in this life! I'm thinking about studying a lot about knowledge but I've beeing thinking about it a lot but haven't really done much with it yet! We will also have our zone meeting this week! That will be good! We still need to think about what we are going to do for like role plays or activities for it! It is like a district meeting but instead we have the entire zone together! I may have shared with you about this before a little bit about prayer! And in the bible dictionary how prayer is a benefit to us! There it talks about sometimes God wants to bless us but those blessings are conditional upon our asking for them! But by our asking for them they are then granted to us! It was just something that I enjoyed as I was studying this week! I hope everyone has a great week and they had a great thanksgiving also! I didn't hear too much about what anyone did for Thanksgiving so maybe I will hear from you all next week about how it was! Thank you for the emails and we will look forward to hearing from you later!:) Elder Peña