"Collect the Elect" (03/23/2010)

Well Hello again. Another week down in the great city of Yakima Washington. I hope everything is going well for all of you. The weather has been really nice of late with the temps. being in the mid 60's during the day while dropping down to the low 30's at night. It has been quite nice.

Things have been going well here of late. We have started a new program here for the next month that I talked about in my last e-mail called Collect the Elect. What it is is we are trying to find all of the people that are ready for the gospel and have a mission-wide baptism on the 17th of April. The goal is to have a whole bucket-load of people being baptized on that date. The way we are going to do that is by Collecting the Elect. Today, Thursday and Saturday, we are going to tract form 6-9 at night, on double exchanges. We are just going to tract and find as many as possible this week. And then the next 3 weeks, we are to make contact with as many as we can every day and try to get as many committed for baptism for the 17th of April. It should be really fun. I will let you know next week on how many people we were able to find.

The people we are teaching are doing well. We did however, have to drop Jorge. He is a great guy, but he has been taught since September and has yet to come to church. Hopefully he can have another run with the church.

Jacinto is doing well. He didn't come to church, which is frustrating. He did though, pray and read the Book of Mormon and he didn't get a distinct answer other than he needs to keep studying. He is an awesome guy. We asked him if he would be baptized on the 17th of April and he said that would awesome but he didn't know for sure yet. We will keep working with him though.

Heraldo is still doing well. He is a little bummed out though because he has yet to find a job. He had to sell his car the other day for a little money. I imagine that would be tough. He is still doing well though.

La Familia Almanza and Rene came to church as well on Sunday. That was really good. The Almanza family hadn't been to church in about 2 years and Rene is Sister Almanza’s Brother. He is a good guy. Their original plan was to only go for Sacrament meeting. Then after that was over they decided to stay for Sunday School as well and then go home, and then once that rolled around, they just stayed for all of it which is a really good sign. They are an awesome family who has a great testimony. Hopefully, we can get them back into the habit of coming to church.

That’s really about it for this week. Hopefully we have a lot more people to talk about next week with Collect the Elect being in full swing. I hope and pray all is well with you. Have a great week.