Lenny

We had a baptism on Saturday.  His name is Lenny and is 9 years old. He got to his interview Friday 2 hours early because he was so excited and before the baptism he took my camera and was taking pictures of the room and the font(almost dropped my camera in the water) "so that he wouldn't forget a thing."   He has a hard life but is a great kid. The funniest thing happened.  He was baptized by a member and while they were in the bathroom changing together we were in another room sing hymns with those that had showed up. The member finished changing first and told Lenny that he was going into the other room and that "when he was done changing he could leave when he wanted," obviously just taking about leaving the room. But Lenny finished changing and left the church and ran home because he was so excited to go tell his neighbors or something. We in the other room had no Idea of this and because he was taking a long time I went to go check in on him and he was gone!   Ha - we checked all of the rooms and outside then asked some kids playing outside and they told us that he had taken off.   Ha - we said a prayer with the group and finished up.  They don’t confirm until Sunday anyways so it was fine.  

We have been doing a lot of service here. We went and cleaned out the back yard of an investigator of the other elders in the branch. We chopped up branches and cut out grass and weeds. The investigator walked around and told us all about her plants. She is super proud of them.  She looks like Catherine Zeta Jones. That explains why the other elder were so willing to do a big ol service project. =D The scary part of the project is that there were two pits about 4 feet deep. One elder cut the grass out of one pit and then we were looking it the muddy mess and black widows started crawling out.  I have seen maybe 4 in my life before that day, 2 of which were here in Mexico. But on Thursday we killed no less than twenty of them; male and female. They weren’t just in the pit; they were in the trees, and bushes and walls.  The two Mexican elders had a spray and every time that someone spotted one, they ran over like the fire squad and dowsed it with raid.  It got sort of sketch working so we, like Biff, "made like a tree and Got out of there."  After the work project, they fed us lasagna and a real salad. I say real because the normal salad that they use here includes shredded lettuce and tomatoes and lemons and no sauce. Ha Elder Kimball saw the meal and said real food! ha  I was crackin up.

This branch has some problems with gossiping and other challenges. There are many that can’t take the sacrament but they are trying to get back into full activity in the church which is noble.  I bore my testimony on friendship and showing love yesterday.  There is one older lady that I have really connected with here. She is super dramatic and gossipy but can get offended very easily - but she and her sister are funny cats. She gets really annoyed by some other members. A member stood up at the beginning to bare her testimony and the one that likes me stood up and left the room. Gosh. I didn’t know what she was doing.  Then she came back and I bore my testimony on showing love and she told me after that it hit her pretty hard. Ha, she actually is really humble in some ways. We had a lesson with her and her husband and she talked about how she was drinking coffee and not reading the scriptures.  We helped them make goals and she hasn’t touched coffee since and she and her non member husband are reading the BoM together every night. 

I really liked your comments on ways to bring meaning to life. I have thought a lot about that in my mish, and I have been able to teach it a lot.

I’d say:

1.             Proactively looking for and following God
2.             Uplifting Interpersonal relationships
3.             Continual individual progression

Here it is super easy to fall into the trap of criticizing the people. There is less education, an anti-progressive culture and a pinch of poverty (prob not as much as megs and meish had).  But criticizing thoughts are so negative and mainly inflicts harm to the critics view of life. I have tried a lot to become friends with them rather than think bad about them for their habits. I kind of have to tell myself that they aren’t going to be my wife, or compañion or child so I should just enjoy the experience for the experience.  

The book you are reading as a fam has 184 pages. At 25 pgs a month it will take more than seven months. I will be done with my first semester of school before that.  I’m excited to read it.