"Completing" Some Families and "Starting" Some Others

March 13, 2011
Well, it has been raining all morning, since before we even woke up. It's nice though. Cools things down just a bit.
This last week was pretty good. We got a new "high score" as a companionship for lessons this week. We also had 9 investigators attend church. That was way awesome. I have to say that the most awesome thing was that this week they moved sacrament meeting to first in the block, and I was worried that our progress in high overall attendance was going to be lost. Because all the weeks that sacrament was last we would start with 15-20 people and by sacrament we would have high 40s. We showed up just before things were about to start, which we usually do because of delays on the trike coming from La Carlota (but we are usually still some of the first to arrive), but this week we got there and there was a ton of people!! Official count comes in at 52! Third highest including branch conference. I was way impressed.

Most of the rest of the week was rather boring. We were doing a lot of finding, and that was not going so well. People come up with the dumbest excuses to not listen to our message. None quite as bad as one Elder Reidhead told me about in his last area. There was this guy sitting there and they started talking to him and his excuse was that he was watching a pot, he wasn't even cooking anything, just watching an empty pot. They talked for several minutes, but he was totally serious about watching the pot. When they walked away the guy just got up and left. Its a funny story.

Saturday we had a baptismal interview for Poypoy (Peliezer) Gonzaga. He is Michael Tilanas' cousin. He and a couple of his friends are our investigators. The other two missed church last week so we had to reschedule their baptism. And Poypoy decided to go ahead and just go first. So we have one baptism this Saturday and five next Saturday. It is going to be awesome. Completing some families and starting some others. The idea is that they will be finished too, and certainly hopefully sooner rather than later.

Yes dad, the parable of the sower and the tree of life and the iron rod really apply to investigators, and its fun to see these people that catch it, understand it and love it. But it is sad to see the others that don't. Those who reject you for lame reasons, those that start out good but end up falling away, and the worst is those that are way good, get baptized and then fall away. Especially when you hear that about your converts.

Well, we are once again looking forward to another good week here in the awesome Ayungon Branch!

Elder Phelps

PS. General Conference is coming up! I'm so excited! There are four really good times a year for missionaries, General Conference is two of those and calling home is the other two!

If I'm not too lazy I'll try and write the YM a letter. But I'm terrible at that, and then even worse at actually getting it sent.