Hey mommy! I love you and I glad to hear that I am an uncle! I had an awesome week this last week. We got a new mission president on the first and I got a new niece, so it was a pretty good day! We found 7 new investigators last week and had the baptism of Karen Andrea Mencia Bruna! She will be confirmed next week. We actually have another baptism planned for that day too! His name is Matias Parkes and is the son of my convert Veronica. He was going to get baptized this week but he was being kind of shy and wouldn´t tell us why. We then found out he didn´t want to stop drinking tea which is understandable but we talked about it. He is 9 and super smart! I held out my hands and said you can drink tea and held one hand out as tea or you can live with your mom for eternity but you can´t do both. He thought about it for a moment and decided that he loved his mother more then tea. During that lesson we were fasting and I know our words were guided by the spirit because I just knew what I need to do and say to help him understand that the commandments are for our eternal well being.
Karens baptism was awesome and she was super happy after her baptism. I love teaching the gospel and seeing the peace that I can bring to people. It was hard and it felt like she took forever to get to the font. It took a little bit over a month, which is crazy but these people change their entire lives in a manner of months because they are filled with the spirit and can feel our love and the love of our heavenly father.
July 13, 2015
I know right I don´t feel like I have been gone for a year but apparently that's what has happened. We had another baptism yesterday. The son of one of my converts finally decided he wanted to be baptized, it was awesome!!! His grandmother came to the baptism and loves the church now. She stayed for the gospel principals class and we talked about the sacrament and she bore her testimony of how good she feels when she is in church and how listening to the class made her feel so warm and close to Christ. It was a very cool experience and well she lives in another city that is in my mission and it is very possible that I could get transferred to where she lives and teach her as well. Another cool experience I had, but first off there are times on your mission when you doubt your ability to teach. The prophets of old did it and well it happens to missionaries now a days too. We had dropped this lady because she couldn't get married. One day I decided we needed to go by and see her. It turned out she was listening to the Jehovah's witnesses and they had given her a bible and she liked it a lot. I was pretty sure when she let us in she was going to rail on us but she just started to explain some of the things that they had taught her. She waited for our response at first but I didn´t know what I should say. I will be honest I was scared that I would say something she didn´t like but I just started speaking. The spirit directed me in the way that we needed to go, we spoke about lesson 1 and how all Church's teach of Christ and how they all teach good things but not all have the right authority. She basically ate it out of our hands because I started using the bible that the witnesses had given her and well their scriptures are different then the regular bible and they have changed quite a bit, so when I started reading from both bibles it made it easy to show her that the bible is not the way to receive a sure answer and how important the need of the Book of Mormon is. I love this promise from the Lord that we shall not be confused before the sons of man and that he will give us in the precise moment all things which we must say if we are paying attention to the spirit.
I really enjoyed reading last weeks letter and getting to know more about you I actually printed it off and have read it a couple times. Tell dad to do the same!
I love you Mom and I have been very grateful for the chance to teach Veronica and Mathias because I can now understand the love that you have for me. He was very hard to teach, he got bored easily and he has the attention span of a goldfish but when we were talking with Veronica she told me about how much I remind her and resemble Mathias and it gives her so much hope ( which is sad if I am her hope) but thank you for teaching me how to be an example and to love the Lord. Te amo con todo mi corazon.(I love you with all of my heart)
Elder Christopher Ryan Barlow Valiente
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