18 April 2011 Work goes on

I saw on the tv that there were fires in Texas and jokingly I said to my comp well my house is going to burn down, cause I wasn't kidding it really might happen. (We had a huge fire near our home last Sunday. It is so dry, hot and windy here we have fires all over Texas - From mom).

So before every thing, lets take a recap of the week. We only baptized one more family in the zone this week. That is way sad as we only have 3 as a zone now, and one that my comp and I baptized. As a mission we have baptized 72 families, that is crazy in just 2 weeks we did that. Next week we will baptize 28 more to get to one hundred.

As for my area we have dropped all investigators and we are starting from scratch, except for one baptism this week so we kept one investigator. She is a reference from a member that comes to church. I say a member that comes to church because only 30 people come to church in my branch. We work all week long and on pay day Sunday, we never really are able to see our work pay off. It is way sad. We have a ton of plans made to get the place up and going again, but only with time. 2 years ago my branch had a attendance of more than 100 members every week, but now who knows what happened - every one is asleep. All the leaders are all tired of this stuff and depressed and have stopped working. It is way sad and the future of the church doesn't look good because we have no young men or young women in our branch. I was the branch chorister this week. I was leading the hymns as if I was the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. haha It was epic. Any ways, our investigator already has her own triple bible and hymn book and has come to church twice. She knows like every thing. Her name is Johana Del Carmen, we will probably baptize her this weekend and hopefully the zone baptizes 5 families but we will see how every thing goes. Satan is working hard against us. haaaa I hate you Satan!!!

Alright best story from Esteli: This didn't happen in my area, but I was a part of it. It was way funny as well as spiritual.

So the elders in the area Ciudad Dario were contacting and it was close to the end of the night and they needed to contact like 6 more people to complete with there goal. So they saw a group of men sitting on a street corner and figured they were just drunks hanging out on the corner, so they went over to invite them to church. In that group there was a guy and his name was Pedro. The next day me and my comp went to Ciudad Dario to do some interviews and to help out for the day. We taught like 2 lessons then while we were walking we passed this Pedro guys house so we asked if we could have a lesson with him, he said yes, but not in his house, it would be better if we go to another house. So we took him to the house of the missionaries and we got chairs and we were sitting out side of the house of the missionaries and so we started the lesson. We started out with questions to see how he is doing and every thing and he just talked for like 20 mins. telling basically his whole life story. Turns out he went to the church in a different city for a year and all of his kids are members. We start teaching the doctrine of Christ, faith, repentance, baptism, the holy ghost and fight till the end. haha We get to the part where we ask if he would like to get baptized and we asked if he would get baptized on Saturday and we were talking to him for the second time ever on a Wed.. So we pop the question and he is like um that is way to early I don't think I can get baptized. I have to think about it. We started to talk and figure out why and eventually we said if we do it Saturday night, what do you think. He was like yeah that's perfect that will give me enough time to think about it. haha Saturday afternoon was to early but in the night it was fine. We were all just way confused so I did a baptismal interview right then and he was ready. He got baptized 2 Saturdays ago. Turns out he has now read half of the Book of Mormon and half of the principals of the gospel book and on Saturday he went and talked to one of the ladies that was going to get baptized and shared his testimony and every thing. Way cool! Sunday he was in a white shirt and tie and received the Aaronic priesthood. That's the story for now.

We also had interviews with president. It was nice to see him and his wife again. I talked to Hermana Arredondo for a good 20 min about life it was way fun.

Well yeah running a marathon is on my bucket list still but more important right now is getting back into shape to do normal things like run a mile, after that we will move on to a marathon.

I started working out every morning to get back into shape for when I get home. I am curious to see how much I weigh these days because I am looking really skinny. President says my hair looks a lot whiter these days. So that is good to know my blond hair is still looking good.

Um I think that is all I have for this week.

Mother's day you can probably just call my cell phone like we did in the office. I have a nice cell phone again, it worked well at Christmas time.

I can't believe that April is almost over. Time is just booking past.

Love, Elder Bloomfield