May 16, 2016

So I see some people write the week number when they write their
emails back home and to friends. I just realized that I have no idea
what my week number is. I feel like I just got here yesterday. So
we'll go with week 1. 

This week we had our ups and downs. First I want to start with the
ups. Last week we found many new investigators. This week we had the
opportunity to teach them again! Rey and Sergio are still amazing are
both are really cool guys! They'll wake up early and play basketball
with you during exercise, the feed you carne asada out of the blue,
and they'll even listen to you talk about the gospel. Rey immediately
accepted a date to be baptized once again when we taught him Wednesday
but Sergio said that they want to wait a little bit longer. Both
promised to come to church with us however. 

Mike is a guy we've been teaching off and on. He has no belief in a
God or a higher power. However the last lesson we had with him was
absolutely perfect! We were in exchanges and I had Elder Fehoko in my
area with me. Elder Fehoko is from the Kingdom of Tonga where 75% of
the population is Mormon and the other 25% is Methodist. Elder Fehoko
told Mike his story of how for 9 years he rebelled against the church
and God and how he came to repent and know the truth. He was the
perfect person to have there. We had Mike promise us to pray later
that night. He told us that he would try. We'll see what happens.

Francisco Regalado is a very crazy man. He is absolutely insane. He is
completely open to having missionaries over but once you sit down he
will talk your ear off over everything. Literally this guy can talk
hours on just about any subject. It's extremely hard to keep the
lesson on tract and even harder to have him keep commitments. The
missionaries have been teaching him for about 6 months now and he has
progressed only a little. One of the major things I have seen is that
when we met him he would schedule lessons 2 weeks ahead. Now we're
meeting with him twice a week. He also promised to come to church and
we hoped that meeting the members would help him start to be more
interested. 

The last person I want to talk about is a 73 year old man named
Marcos. He is completely amazing!!! We talk a lot about the Book of
Mormon with him because out of everything we have in the gospel, the
Book of Mormon is what he is most interested in. In our last lesson we
taught him how to pray and he gave the closing prayer. Afterwards he
cried and said that that was the most amazing he has ever felt in a
very long time. He won't commit to any major commitments yet but he
will commit to reading more of the Book of Mormon. When he does I know
he will come around. He also told us that he would try to make it to
church. 

Okay now for the downs, we had only one person come to church. It was
Fransisco. It was hard for us that no one else made it and we even
went by some of their homes before church to make sure that they would
come. But Fransisco came all on his own and loved it. He has his
parents coming in town this week and they are very Catholic but he
said that he's going to invite them to come next Sunday. We hope that
this is finally his time to accept the gospel. 

That's all that happened this week. I hope everything is going great back home. 

Elder Austin