AJ's email 3/19/2012

 alright first things first, there is a surprise from this week, a huge one. and that is...we might be having a baptism this week. its a crazy story. so wednesday night we didnt have much to do. and we got a little hungry so we decided to go by a lady that works in front of the only store in el monte selling montinos (basically just hot dogs wrapped in bread, sometimes they have cheese in them too) she is a less active member that contacted us a couple weeks ago and wants to come back to church and so we are helping her remember a lot of stuff cuz its been a long time since she has come to church. and then she has a daughter that we are teaching. but all that has nothing to do with the baptism, just the fact that we were hungry. so we bought the montinos and thought of somewhere to go to eat them. and i remembered that seminary started here this week and so the church is going to be open every night. so we went to the church to eat. while we were there, the ward secretary was there doing some work with the ward records. so elder vilar asked him whats going on and if there is anything new like we always do, but this time he said yes. apparently he was going through the records and noticed that a girl named javiera that just turned 12 and entered into young womens, doesnt actually exist in the church system as being baptized. and so they sent a request to salt lake asking for her record. salt lake answered on wednesday saying that she was never baptized. so he showed that to us and asked what needs to be done. so then this whole week has been us talking with the assistants of the mission to see how fast we  can baptize her. cuz without presidents permission, she would have to go to church 3 straight weeks and get taught all the lessons like any other investigator. but tomorrow we have our interviews with president king and so we are going to ask his permission to baptize her this week. cuz she doesnt need us to teach her anything, she has been going to church for the last 12 years and already knows the answers to the baptismal interview questions. hopefully everything works out. and after all the work that we have done here, it would be a gift from heaven to have a baptism now the last week of the change.

Yikes...I need to shave! 

         thats the biggest news from this week. saturday we did service in the morning with the ward. we had to cut the trees so that they arent so big, but i dont know why, we just did it. and at the same time we had to scrape the layer of plastic off of the field. i dont know how to describe it much better than that. its just like some plastic stuff they put on top of the concrete so that its not so slippery and so that the paint stays. but we did that so that they can come and redo it and then paint new lines on there. it was a lot of fun hanging out with them and laughing the whole time. and then at the end we had a bbq. so anytime we can have fun and eat, its a good time.

         thursday we had a good lesson with joel and veronica. they are really starting to open up a lot more to us. really the whole family is. we are good friends with the 4 kids too. but this week was good because of what veronica told us. before she has always said that she doesnt want to go to church yet cuz she wants to put their life in order first and get everything straightened out that needs to be done. but this week, she told us that her and joel were talking about it. and she asked him if he´d like to go to church and he said something like sure why not. so i was glad to see that they are progressing pretty well. hopefully they will come to church this week. we are gonna do everything we can to get them there.

          thats just about everything from this week. well really there is a little more but im so tired from playing soccer this morning that i dont feel like writing it all cuz its a lot of the same stuff. but this week should be really interesting with everything going on with javiera and figuring out the whole situation. i hope that everyone is doing well. take care