Week 37: We got Joelson!!!!!

Hey everybody!

Thats right...after 12 weeks of incredibly hard work (and 7 years before of him working with missionaries,) Joelson FINALLY was baptized this week! Due to a lack of luck, we were never even able to teach Joelson this week, although I had a few conversations with him on the phone to help him out. But on Saturday morning, he came with his family, and he finally was baptized!! I had the honor to baptize him (picture included), and the whole service was incredibly nice. And, to add to that miracle, we were worried that we would have to wait 2 or 3 weeks to do the confirmation because of Allinis work schedule. But, by a miracle (and I still dont know what that miracle was), she was able to get work off on Sunday to watch Joelson get confirmed. For me personally, this has become one of my biggest achievements on my mission until now.

I would put information about the rest of our investigators, but Elder Taveira and I are doing whats called a "house cleaning": where we basically are about to start new. The rest of our investigators are incredibly resistant, and not wanting to hear much more. After using the majority of our Saturday to remind them about church and emphasize the importance of visiting the church to know if its true (you cant know if a church is true if you dont enter it!), but unfortunately, we didnt have any investigators at church this week. So well still visit these people, but we wont put emphasis on people that dont want to. And perhaps our lack of presence will incentivise them (I think incentivise is a word? Portuguese is killing my English) to go to church. But we will find Gods elects.

And in other news, we had transfers this week. Elder Taveira and I are still here in JDM for the next 5 weeks (its a shortened transfer), but Elder Carr and Elder Baldera both left the area. We now have two ancient missionaries here- Elder Bow from California (this is his last transfer as a missionary,) and Elder Ladwig from Brazil (he has one more transfer than Elder Bow.) Theyre working a lot to learn their area, so we dont talk to them a whole lot, but from how much weve talked to them, they seem like decent enough roommates. So all in all, itll be a good transfer.

Alright, everybody! Thanks for everything! On to individual emails! (Next weeks email will be longer, I promise!) Love you all!

Elder Youd