19 Feb 2018

Hey there family and friends.

So this week has been pretty good for us here in our area. We were able to confirm to baptismal dates and take some recent converts to the temple. But lets break it down a little more. 

So we have two investigators that are really really really close to being baptized here in our area. We having been working really hard with the ward as well to help them know the investigators better and help the investigator feel welcomed here to the ward. So one of the investigators names is Celeste. She has been listening to the elders for along time and she has a great testimony. Remember when i told you all about that investigator that wanted to bear her testimony_ Well this is her. We have been really pushing to help her make that this choice and be baptized. We have taken her to the temple, we have had the ward stop by and visit her, and she has visiting teachers. But she hasn’t taken that step of being baptized. So we had her talk with the bishop and talk about everything really. So that was going on and all that, and then the bishop pulled us into his office and we were there with celeste. We talked for a bit and the bishop told us that she had made up her mind and was gonna get baptized. We got so happy when we heard, it was awesome to be 100% honest. We just have to plan it all out so that her whole family can come. We got get that rolling this week. 

For the other investigator we have Adolfo. Now he is kind of a weird one to be honest. His whole family are members of the church, He has been listening to the elders for about 2 years now, and he is still not yet baptized. Like I don’t understand sometimes like who is it that someone could be listing to the elders for so long and not get baptized. Or how could you be living in a house full of members and you don’t know anything about that church. Like what do you talk about with your family? So anyways, we have been working really hard with this investigator was well. We have been trying to get his family more involved and having them get more supportive with him. His wife has been a member here who life and knows a lot about the church. We are really trying to help her see that if she wants to be with her family forever she needs to have her husband baptized so they can go into the temple together. But we did the same thing for him as we did for Celeste. We had him go into an interview with the bishop to talk about everything. Now when we heard that he had committed to a date for the 23 I was shocked. I didn’t think that it was ever gonna happen. Yes I had faith that one day it was going to happen but I didn’t think it was going to happen in my time.  But we are both really excited that both of our investigators are now committed to a baptismal date.

We have been really working hard with those two right now. We have some other investigators that are coming along little by little but it will all come in time. I have found that we teach a lot of people with the same need. For example I have taught a lot of people about taking that step of faith. And there was a story in the bible that talks about this kind of step taking. It tells the story of a group of men that are gonna pass through the Jordan river. But there was a prophet that told them they would be able to cross through the river because the river would open up. But once they got to the river, it was normal. It hadn’t changed or anything like that. So they sat there for a while until one of them put his foot into the water. And the water started to open up. They walked a little bit more and then the whole river opened up and they were able to cross. The morale of the story is that we need to take that step of faith until something happens. We need to act on something if we want to change something in our lives. Now I have used this example with almost all of the investigators in the mission. It’s really interesting how we can say we have faith in something but we just wait for something to make our faith grow. Unless we act on the faith we have and help our selves grow in faith. We will be standing by the edge of the water waiting for something to happen. This is something as well that I have taken into my life here in the mission. If we have faith that there are people here in our area, we need to act on and work hard and search for these people.

The saying I have been using my whole mission is keep moving forward. And it has become something really special to me. It helps me know that there are going to be hard time here in the mission but we just need to keep moving forward to open new doors and do new things. Because we are curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. And the paths that we go down here in the mission are the paths to people’s doors. The paths to our own conversion. The paths to help build our testimony. There are hundreds of different paths to go down but we need to first move forward to find them. 

Thanks for all the love and support always! Thanks for all the help you all give my family and me! Hope you all have a great week! 

Love Elder Nelson