A Good Solid Week.....

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope everyone is doing well and that they are staying out of the cold. It was 28 degrees this morning and was so hard to wake up on time. Things are well here in Fabens, and I can say we had a good solid week. We had some pretty good experiences this week while looking for more people to teach. This area has a lot of potential, and we have so many connections with possible investigators that we cannot seem to control all of them at once. So we really have the more important ones in focus and the other ones we can only visit maybe once a week.

The Lord is helping us a lot in this area. The goal for the mission is 600 baptisms by the end of this year. We have two more months left and we are short around 150.  So each zone needs to get about 8 a month. At first I was certain that it wasn’t really possible, but I thought I would give it my best shot anyway. I have seen in the last two weeks, the Lord opening up doors in our area that have not been opened for a long time. One of these experiences was with an investigator who a year ago lived in this area, who was taught all the lessons and was interviewed and right before she was baptized she had to move to Colorado cause her mother got really sick. The missionaries in the area told her that they would send the missionaries, but for some reason they never got there. Well she just got back a few weeks ago and as soon as she found our number she called us. This call was in the middle of planning, right when we were wondering how we were going to find some new investigators. It’s great that she didn’t get lost in the year between the last lesson and now. She and her husband will soon be preparing for baptism.

Another blessing from the Lord happened last night. It was about 8 o’clock and I wasn’t sure who to visit, but I felt like going by and visiting this less active member family who has a daughter of 11 years but was never baptized. The missionaries in the past have said that they have tried and that the family doesn’t want to come back and no one in the ward has any idea why they don’t want to. So we got there and we sat down with the father and after in little bit of chatting we asked if we could talk to the daughter. She came out and we decided to teach a first lesson. We taught to her needs instead of teaching all the points and basically just taught about the Holy Ghost, Joseph Smith and Baptism. When we talked about the Holy Ghost I turned and asked the father when a time he felt the Holy Ghost was and what did it feel like. He told a story were his mother was about to pass away and so his dad gave her a blessing. After the blessing she healed rapidly and lived many years longer. It was then where he began to cry and said that it was in that moment, that he knew without a doubt this church is true. We found out that the reason they have not been coming to church is because the wife lost her testimony. We set a date for the young girl to be baptized and will be talking with the mother next week to try to help her gain a testimony back.

I had a cool experience this week with the Morales family where we dropped by their house and the daughter and son-in-law was there. The son-in-law is not a member and the daughter had been less active for over a year. To give some background information, the mom had lost her eyesight about a year ago from not controlling her diabetes very well. She’s not completely blind, but let’s just says she can’t really see our faces and she can’t read books. Anyway she was not feeling very well and so I offered to give her a blessing, she accepted. In the blessing I remember saying stuff about how she was felling and then something about how her sight would be healed if she tried to read the Book of Mormon every day, even though she can’t see the letters very clearly. Well a week later I found out that she has been trying to read the best she can every day, and on Friday she went in for a checkup and was planning on setting a time for another eye surgery because after the first one, it only got worse. They were surprised to tell her that she wasn’t going to need it because for some reason her eyesight was healing at a faster rate than was expected even after the first surgery? I have a feeling that the daughter will soon be coming back and that we will have another person to teach. Its moments like these that make my testimony grow of how powerful the Book of Mormon is and how the priesthood is real.

Well that is all for this week. I love you all.

Elder Daniel Stewart