I don't have a lot of time to write emails this week but I will include a couple things before I get going.
So
we got our transfer calls last night and Elder Austin is leaving to go
right next door on the other side of the freeway to a branch called
Sacramento 7 (which used to be a part of the ward I'm serving in now
until it split about a year ago). My new companion is going to be an
Elder named Elder Sarmiento, who only has a few months left in his
mission and goes home in December. He is from Peru so he speaks Spanish
perfectly. I'm really excited to be with an elder that is fluent in
Spanish because that helps a lot and also someone who has a lot of time
in the mission.
This week was great. We had my first baptism of Federico Pimentel,
the 9 year old kid who is part of a part member less active family.
The baptism went really well and I got to baptize him so it was
awesome. It was a day of miracles because as soon as his baptism was
over we talked to his 12 year old aunt that we've been teaching named
Brandi and she told us she wants to get baptized so we're going to
baptize her on the 18th! Then we went over to visit Luz and Gustavo who
are getting their divorce papers and we are going to get them married
and baptized on the 18th as well! So we have 3 baptisms coming up in
about 2 weeks.
We tried something really cool this week. I was reading a
letter from Elder Mitch Daniels about a month ago where he said his
mission president asked them during weekly planning to plan for family X
and family Y, two families that they weren't teaching right now that
they had faith that they would find in the next week. The next day they
had 2 families they didn't know show up to church and they were blessed
with two new families, family X and family Y to start teaching. I
decided I wanted to do that here so during weekly planning on Saturday
Elder Austin and I planned for family X. We planned what we would teach
them this week and we planned to see them on Wednesday and Friday
night. As it turns out, we were blessed the same day to find TWO
families to take family X's place. We went to visit a potential we had
and ended up finding his cousin named Misael. Misael told us he used to
go to church with the missionaries when he lived in Idaho about two
years ago but lost contact with the church when he moved to Los Angeles.
He is a really nice guy and didn't come to church on Sunday but he
will be a solid investigator. Later in the night we were looking for
another potential and we ended up talking to her daughter who's about 23
and son who's about 16. We knocked on the door at about 8 at night
when it was getting dark and they opened up the door and the first thing
they said was "wow, you guys look really happy!". I immediately said
"That's because we are! And we're here to tell you how you can be as
happy as we are". We talked to them for a while and they were really
interested and told us they had friends who were Mormon and wanted to
know more. They told us they were going to come to church but had a
couple things they needed to do so they weren't sure. They ended up not
coming and we have a return to go see them Friday night so we'll find
out then what happened. The coolest part about the whole thing was that
the returns we got with Misael, and Maria and Andres happened to be the
exact same times we had planned to go see "family X". We were
extremely blessed and it was cool to see that miracle. I hope
everything turns out well with these people we added!
I don't have too much more time and I still need to write to the mission president, sooo until next week!
Los Quiero,
Elder Gaskill
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