August 26th, 2013

 This week was really good. We had a baptism (my first one in about 4 months..) and 9 investigators come to church with us. Here are the highlights from our week:

Tuesday: We had a zone conference and it was really cool because it was in my old area in Cali. The conference really was focused on love and charity for the investigators. Everything that we do should be based on the love that we have for the people.  After the conference we went and visited a couple people from my old area and that was super neat to see some old members and investigators from there. When I first arrived in that area I replaced an elder named Elder Darley and it turns out that I am with him now in Terron my new area! We had a lot of mutual investigators that we wanted to visit in Las Americas so we went together to visit some people after the conference. Super Cool :) 

Wednesday:We had a 2 hour meeting with the bishop and talked about all the members and problems. Of course there are a lot of problems but the bishop seems super willing to help so I think that is something that a lot of wards in Colombia don`t even have. We have a huge members list with about half of them marked less active or inactive.

Weekend:  We had the baptism of our investigator Angie. She is a 16 year old girl and is part of a big family that we are teaching. She is the second of the family to get baptized and we are working to baptize all of the family one by one. One thing that they teach us is that it is always better to work with part member families and try and get baptisms from that. In our zone conference they shared with us a family of like 10 people that all ended up getting baptized and it started with the baptism of their 15 year old son. 

On Saturday we had the baptism of Angie and 3 other people from other missionaries. The missionaries from the other area ended up being super disorganized with things and we ended up starting ONE HOUR later than the scheduled time at 7 p.m.  I was getting a little sick of playing prelude music on the electric piano there for that whole time! In Colombia things  usually end up starting late, but one hour was just ridiculous. The program was pretty good though. We practiced a little music number that morning and performed it in the baptisms with the 8 missionaries. I guess now that I am not with Elder Novoa (my old companion that was known as the best piano player in the mission) I will have a lot more opportunities to play piano. 

Sunday:We had the confirmation of Angie and I had the opportunity to do it! It was my first confirmation I have ever done and a little hard in Spanish still, but I think I did all right. I was pretty scared at first! After church we had an activity with the family that lives below our house and made chocolate chip cookies! I had the recipe from mom and these people have an oven so we took advantage of that and made some cookies! It was a little hard because they don`t really have like measuring cups and stuff here but we figured it out. They turned out alright, but defintitely not as good as mom or hermana Prince (wife of our mission pres.) makes them! I will have to send some pictures of us making the cookies. 

 My comp. is Elder Vaca from Ecuador. He has 7 months in the mission and is a funny guy and always pretty animated. He has a lot less experience than Elder Novoa my last companion, but we are going to try and work together and hopefully I can share what I have learned from my companions in our area here. 

Love,

Elder Armstrong