Jan 11, 2016

Well it's been a crazy week. My family's new home is the hospital and
I hate it but hopefully it'll go back to normal soon enough.

This week we were mainly planning for a wedding for one of our
investigators. Her name is Valerie and she's been an investigator for
a while. The day of the wedding we arrived at the church building at
8:30 with the cake and started setting up. By 9:20 we had everything
ready and we were just waiting for people to show up. We had about 25
people at their wedding which was more than I expected and even some
people who weren't members showed up. I played the piano for them
before, during, and after the ceremony. This is them:

The girl on the far right is not part of their family and they have one more daughter who is 12 who is not in the picture. The parents and the 12 year old daughter are all on date to be baptized on the 30th of this month. They will join the church as a family. 

Other exciting news is that I found a better way to fellowship less actives back into the Branch. We're going to call it "noche de jugar." The first one will be on the 18th of February. It's pretty much like a huge family home evening. So right now I'm focusing on finding all of the less actives in the area and inviting them to this event on the 18th. I'm also giving them food assignments to help encourage them to show up. What's go to happen there is that we're going to have music and games for the first part and then we'll end with a spiritual thought. It will probably be the plan of salvation. We're going to try to make this a monthly event or maybe even weekly but I've only heard good things about events like this. The sister missionaries in our district have something similar which is their Book of Mormon Club. It's pretty much just a fun night with food and friends and the Book of Mormon and they've been having more success than anyone! So hopefully my "noche de jugar" will be just as successful. 

Yesterday at church we had Valerie and her daughter Kimberly at church. We also had 2 less active families return to the branch. One of them was be jade we visited them and invited them to come back. This is pretty big for the branch because I was talking to the Young men and Young women presidents yesterday and they told me that the leadership in the branch are drowning in work. There aren't enough people willing to do their callings because of work and too many people in the branch to work for. So now that we're deactivating members, they can receive callings and help the struggling leadership. This is what needs to happen before we start getting non members into the branch otherwise we would just be baptizing people into a branch that doesn't want them. It's sad but it's what I was told by quite a few of the leadership. So I'm really hoping this "noche de jugar" will help with fellowship ping the less actives back to church. 

Well that's pretty much everything with me. Hope everyone is doing well. 

Elder Austin