9 July 2018

So, this week has been kind of crazy. It's felt like two weeks in one, and just absolutely flown by. So not too much happened in the first few days of the week, just that those teenagers Maria and Antonio we had been teaching weren't there for their return appointments and they weren't responding to texts.  So, on Thursday, we declared a temporary drop on them and made plans to contact them next Thursday. But Wednesday was really the big day of this week. That was when we had our first meeting with the new mission president, President Holland. Wow, it was intense! He is definitely a different sort of mission president than President James was. The big quote from the meeting that people keep on quoting is, "If you are disobedient and aren't going to change, I will not hesitate to send you home." That's a big change from before. Personally, I think it's for the better. But we also got to meet his family, and that was pretty cool. No, we didn't get to meet his dad. And yes, that is how he refers to him. It's kind of funny. But it was a really great meeting and we're all super pumped to be able to work with them.

The big thing of this week happened yesterday. So, we were trying to go to a few appointments last night, but they were all falling through. We were heading to the last one where the miracle happened. We were in the same trailer park that Maria and Antonio lived in, and we were walking down this one street a pretty good distance away from their house. So imagine our surprise when they were pulling away from a house and driving towards us! So Maria stopped the car and we started talking to them. They invited us to come by to talk with them more that night, and we said we'd be able to go soon. We tried our last appointment at about 8:00, but they weren't there either. So we walked down to Maria and Antonio and got to teach them the Plan of Salvation! It was way cool. They had a lot of really great questions and were getting involved. Now there's a few things involved in what made last night so crazy. 1: We had decided to park in a nearby parking lot and walk to this trailer park, rather than park in front of the trailers that we had planned on visiting. If we hadn't done that, the timing would have been off. 2. There was a set of sisters that were driving by at the time and stopped us to ask us if this was our area. Basically, the boundaries in that part are really weird and so there's a few streets that are kind of a gray area. Again, the timing would have been off if that didn't happen. And 3. All of the appointments fell through. If they had been there, we wouldn't have been walking down the right street at the right time. So basically, everything lined up perfectly to allow us to talk with them again. We are going to invite them to be baptized after we get the chance to talk with their mom again, which should be happening tomorrow. So yeah, we're getting excited over here. I think that's about it for this week, bye!