Marino, Daniel

We had a great baptismal service on Saturday! It was so fun. This was Elder Crabb's first baptismal service and first time baptizing someone and everything. Marino and Marìa Luisa were finally able to get married during the week. We came by and night to congratulate them, and ate awesome sweet bread and hot chocolate. After talking about eternal families, we read the lyrics to Families Can Be Together Forever and then sang it. That was powerful. They have four young boys who are currently members and a few older ones who we're working with, but basically the Pacheco family is going to be a missionary powerhouse in a few years here. So now that Marino was married, he was able to be baptized and confirmed this weekend. Daniel was also baptized. His dad is not a member, and so things have been a little complicated at their house. But on Saturday, his dad came to the service! Daniel was infectiously happy, and his dad gave him a big hug at the end. A bunch of Daniel's cousins who we are teaching came too. It was great.

We knocked a door during the week that we thought was a reference we were looking for, but it turns out it's just this cool girl named Ani. She has family members who are in the other ward, but aren't super active right now. So, we left her with a Book of Mormon and an invitation to read it and pray about in preparation to be baptized. When we came back, she said she had read it and prayed about it, and does not believe that it's true, which kind of took me aback. She had a lot of doubts about the Plan of Salvation doctrine that didn't fit in with her study in the Bible, and said she had come to the conclusion that the Bible is more than enough scripture. We tried sharing some different scriptures and testifying, but we really didn't find a way to help her out at the time. But she did come to church on Sunday, which was really cool.

Throughout the week, we were able to be a lot busier and taught a lot of lessons. However, not all of the lessons were great. I'm trying to get better at just being more organized, being able to set up lessons with members, being able to get to all of our appointments on time. We ended up teaching quite a few half-lessons to new people (where we sort of ran out of time and left a pamphlet), and then haven't been able to teach them again. I just want to be able to focus on the people we're teaching during a lesson so that we can really listen and help them, instead of being stressed about making it to the next thing. But it was a really great week, overall. We're really tired now, and I guess that is the result of working hard.