6/26/17 Farewell to President Jacobson. New President coming soon.

Companionship Study in a park

Member dinner with Karla and the district, she made really really good food

Fam,

A lot has happened in the last +week. I left off I believe about the make or break lesson with German. I'll talk about that in a second. 

I had a few days left with Elder Waters and they passed fairly uneventfully. 

We had our last zone conference with President Jacobson. It was pretty nice. He basically spent the whole time preparing us for a lot of changes. It was a nice meeting. He had us make specific long term goals about becoming better disciples of Christ, outlined the importance of goals, and wished us the best of luck. We get our new President the first of the next month. We've already received a few changes, so far only good things. The first and most important thing was the dissolving of set car-fast days. I may or may not have been praying for that for quite a while. Now we can do what we want with our cars everyday of the week, SO NICE. We've heard talk of Ipads but that's only hearsay, I have my doubts on that one. 

Saturday we had our lesson with German. It was a decent lesson. He expressed his fears and said he wasn't ready. It was kind of a hard blow. We walked in basically ready to plan his baptism. He also, and more importantly, expressed some concerns he has that he hasn't been fully forthright with. He said he still wants to be baptized, and wants to continue working with us. So that is what we will do. A few days later we got a message from a member that has been talking with German who is about his same age. She said she got a message from German expressing more of his concerns and doubts. He has been kind of all over the place. We spent a few minutes trying to think of what he needs. I've spent a lot of time praying for and about him specifically, and I really know that God guides his work. A few weeks ago the idea to buy him a study journal come to me in prayer. A few days later we bought the journal, wrote some instruction and my testimony in it and planned on giving it to him. For like three lessons in a row I forgot it in the car or in the apartment. I kind of felt like at this point I shouldn't give it to him and it would be kind of weird, then we got the message about his concerns. Our last lesson with him we gave him the journal. Hopefully that helps. I think that will really help him catalog what he knows, his questions, and the answers he receives from either us, the scriptures, and/or God. I still see a lot of potential in him. 

On the topic of investigators the Aguilars know the church is true. We think we may have found their source of hesitancy. They are doing great though. We had a review lesson on the plan of salvation, it's been a while and we figured it was something they needed to hear again. We also found a great video on the dedication of the temple in El Salvador. They loved it. We talked about temples and family history. Elder Rencher has a bunch of visual teaching aids for this lesson that really engaged their kids. We talked about baptism for the dead and their opportunity to offer that ordinance to their deceased  parents. Gilda made us some empanadas, they were so good. I need to learn how to make Hispanic food.  So far the list is small, but it consists of empanadas, pupusas, tortillas, and anything but white rice. 

Sunday we finally got a branch mission leader. That'll be nice. 

We picked up two more pretty cool guys this week. One guy is sadly going to Mexico in a few weeks and will be there for a few months, so we have like three weeks to work a miracle. The other is a 7th day Adventist. He is pretty sweet. We had a really good lesson with him, I'm not sure how far he will want to go with us, but we'll see. Our first lesson with him we kind of just chatted. It was really nice. He asked if we could read something in the Bible. We turned to the 10 commandments and he read through his Adventist bible. Interesting there are some important word differences. It almost got bashy but we turned it around pretty well. 

Apparently I've heard that the Adventist Bible was an English to English "translation", can someone validate this?
The weather has been perfect for the last few days. Its been in the 60-70s, its so nice!

Member dinner with Karla and the district, she made really really good food