We Had An Amazing Week!!

Wow this week was crazy!  We had an amazing week!!  We were super super blessed throughout the whole week!  We are just trying to get things ready because Elder Olson found out he is going to train!  So we are just trying to get the area all ready for him!  However this includes a lot of things!  Like finding a house which actually is a lot more difficult than it should be here in Mexico!  When you aren't looking for a house you find thousands but as soon as it is important there are zero houses!  So that is kind of where we are at right now!  But I guess I will give a recap of the rest of the week!

Monday we went and taught a family that we had found the week before and it went really really well!  We taught the book of Mormon and they were totally into it! Then we had normal P day and went to a family night at night! It was a good day!  Very productive!

Tuesday we had tons of appointments and so we were going to do divisions but then five minutes before starting we had a member cancel on us and we had no idea what we were going to do!  We just decided that we needed to work as hard as we could to try and get the majority of the visits done! The good news was that we had our family night canceled and so it was one less visit! So we went and we taught the family Camacho.  It was an amazing lesson!  We taught the restoration and the spirit was sooooooooo strong!  It was amazing!  Then we went with a less active that hasn't gone to church in years and he committed himself to go to church! Hopefully he actually goes! We also had miracle number one of the week! We were out contacting and I remembered an old investigator that we had taught a few times and so we ran to her house to see if she was there. Turns out she had moved but her family still lived there.  They let us in and we taught them and we found a new family that we are really excited to see progress! They have potential!  There are six kids that are between the ages of 8 and 13 so it is kind of a party when we teach them but it is awesome to have found a family like this! We truly were blessed!

Wednesday was a different day.  Presidents Grandchildren were in town and one thing that they wanted most was to be able to have dinner with the missionaries! So us the Assistants the Nebekers and the sister training leaders got invited to a dinner with President and his family!  It was super fun to be able to be there with them and to spend time with them!

Sister Stutznegger, "Dinner with some special missionaries tonight - it was one of the grand kids requests - time with some missionaries!"

Sister Stutznegger, "We think the twins liked Elder Orchard."  Laura Stutznegger (Pres. and Sis Stutz's daughter) wrote about this picture, "Jenny, my boys were infatuated immediately! He was so cute with them!! Elder Orchard is a fantastic missionary!!"

They made pulled pork sandwiches that were so good!  I think I ate two or three!  I ate my fair share that is for sure! But then after we were just sitting there and it was really cool to have a conversation with their grandchildren about how the mission is and funny stories and stories that we have been blessed and give them advice for the mission it is definitely something that I am going to remember!  Then we just came home and got ready to go to Polanco the next day!

Thursday was Polanco day but it was actually pretty weird the way everything went down!  So I went in the morning and we went with the assistants but then after we ate I headed home to be able to do appointments in the night!  I had a super good night with Daniel on divisions we got tons of stuff done! We were able to see some less active families and go and see the crazy kids again!  It was a super fun day! I learned a lot from Daniel just like always when I am with him! He is such a good guy!  He gets it and it is awesome to have members like him in your ward! We are blessed to have many that are always willing to help us!

Friday we went and cleaned the Pila.  It was fun and luckily it drained almost completely this time so we didn't have to completely empty it with buckets!  Then we went home and got all ready to head out and teach!  We had another good day! We got a fecha put and so it was super nice to do that! We will be baptizing next Saturday and Sunday it will be an awesome way to finish off my time here in Leandro valley! Then we went to two family nights.  Elder Olson got really close to putting a fecha with a lady that has gone to church for years but she just won't get baptized for some reason! We are trying and we at least got her committed for in August but we invited her to pray and to see what God told her!  It was a super powerful lesson is what the Nebekers and Olson said! Then I went and worked with a family that we are trying to get married!  We had a super amazing day again!  

Saturday we went to a baptism for a kid in the ward!  It was super cool! Then we went and tried to find some people we have been wanting to see!  Then we headed out to try and contact Julio since we haven't seen him in forever! We only found his brothers and so like a good missionary we contacted him and we put an appointment to go and visit him on Tuesday we will see how it goes! His mom also said that she would take him to church tomorrow if they got home in the night and didn't stay with his brother!  Of course they did stay with his brother far away but it was still a good day that we had!  Then we went with the Family Alva.  We hadn't seen them and they had been passing through some difficulties and so we went and had an amazing lesson about church assistance hopefully they actually go tomorrow!  But other than that we had a good day that was productive! 

It capped off an amazing week that we had!  We ended up finding twelve new investigators and we have really upped our teaching pool!  We needed it! We got blessed for sure!  Hopefully we can put some fechas with more people this week so that way things can be good to go for when Olson's first son gets here!  We are really excited! 

This week we had a really really cool experience that I wanted to share with you all! When we were cleaning the font we obviously didn't go dressed as missionaries! Well we got in a taxi and just started to talk with the taxi guy and he didn't know that we were missionaries but he was talking about how he just doesn't understand religions and why there are so many and all sorts of stuff that make people golden investigators!  So now we transformed into missionary mode and just taught him what we knew and said we had a book that we knew would help his life if he would just read it so of course he was so ready and we gave him a book of Mormon and taught him for a sec here in the offices it was a super cool thing that we could do! It made me realize that missionary work is really not hard!  God is constantly preparing people to be taught the gospel it just is our part to help them find the gospel and teach them!  There is a scripture that is in Doctrine and Covenants that I really like that President has shared with members before that I would like to share it is in seccion 33 verses 8 and 9

 8 Open your mouths and they shall be filled, and you shall become even as Nephi of old, who journeyed from Jerusalem in the wilderness.

 9 Yea, open your mouths and spare not, and you shall be laden with sheaves upon your backs, for lo, I am with you.

It is really as easy as this!  Open your mouths and they shall be filled!  A lot of times we don't want to share the gospel because we don't know how to or we are scared but this is a promise that the Lord made that goes for all the people that want to share the gospel! Be it missionaries or members if we will just open our mouths it will be filled and we will know what to say!  I know this is true!  If we put of our part the Lord will bless us with the words!  We will never find people to accept us if we don't open our mouths and try! Have a great week!!  I love you all!!

Love,

Elder Orchard