Week 90!!!

Hello!!

I hope all of you had a good Halloween! Ours was decent, I guess! Actually, I liked it a lot! So, this week was pretty interesting for a lot of reasons. It started out great. We taught a few good lessons, we went on exchanges which is always interesting. Kati is doing good, so is Ignacio. But, he put off his baptismal date for two weeks. He said he is giving Trinidad a last chance to get baptized; he really wants to do it with her. But, if she wont then he will do it alone. Pray for them both!! I am still confident that after he does she will, but we'd all like to see them do it together.

So, Friday night we were supposed to be in our apartment passed 5:00, or 6:00 if we had a dinner appointment, which we didn't, for our safety and the safety of the rep of the church. We had planned to have a little party with the other Elders who live in our complex. Elder Nanto's mom gave him $100 for pizza and junk food. But, last minute, up top cancelled our party and made everyone clean their apartments. Super lame. So, we had our own party after cleaning. (It just doesn't take like 5 hours to clean a small apartment) But, after that, an emergency zone meeting was called from 8:00 to 9:00 at night on Halloween. So, we put on our suits and go to the church and met with our zone. It was a really really cool meeting. I guess our mission hasn't reached a baptismal goal since December last year. So, in MLC they threw out their agenda and all duked it out to figure out why. That happened in the day of Friday, then at night, the zone leaders brought it to us and we had a big discussion and set our goals as well. The mission has a goal of 75 baptisms by the end of the year, which is a lot more then we have previously accomplished. But, definitely within reach, especially as we work together on a common goal, and we strive to accomplish it with God's help. It was very good meeting. This transfer and next really are special because there are 16 people in my zone, and of them six go home in the next two transfers, and two more in the next four giving us all lots of experience to pool into and coordinate our plan. I know I definitely came out of this meeting very pumped up to go out with a bang and to prove what we as missionaries can do, especially with God's help. We followed this up with a very powerful meeting again on Saturday where we all came together and set specific goals to accomplish what we need to do so that the mission can accomplish their goals. We were all super pumped up and ready to go fight to the finish.

It was a little odd however because right after we had this, all of our members we had set up to go to lessons fell through, and all of our lessons we had to take members to fell through. Friday, during the day through Saturday we have not taught a lesson, or found any new investigators while the rest of the zone seemed to be doing so. I was starting to get discouraged after a few very hard days. I was really trying to figure out why and found this scripture in Jacob 4:7 which reads "Nevertheless, the Lord God showeth us our weakness that we may know that it is by his grace, and his great condescension's unto the children of men, that we have power to do these things" and I was really humbled. I was very confident that I (in caps for emphasis but you can't tell cuz it's supposed to be in caps anyways :) ) could do the things I needed to in order to meet the goals. Then, all progress towards them halts. I know that with God, anything according to His will is possible, and as we include God in our lives, He will use us for very magnificent things. That is why this was one of my favorite weeks. It was a pretty hard few days, but I learned a priceless lesson.

I hope you all have a good week!

Love,
Elder Lloyd