Firstly, thank you soooo much for the package that you sent me mom. Wow!!! You know exactly what I love, you really must be my mom. I love Sees candy and that box was too good to be true. I really was surprised by that lovely detail. I will eat that little by little, to saver the taste of home. I received that package on Monday while I was at the office and opened it and shared with the office missionaries and a senior couple the dried bananas that you sent me. They seemed to like them. Thank you so much. I loved the little comments on every one as well. That was very....cute. Haha.
Yesterday, Tuesday, we had a Zone Conference here in Madrid. The three zones here all met in the stake center by the temple and we had a great meeting. Elder Ketchum and I had thirty minutes to be able to address the zones and I was hoping that we would be able to do something together. As this will be Elder Ketchum´s last zone conference he chose to do separate talks instead. I am not as confident as I would like to be in giving talks that have not been written out.
I feel like I can´t communicate very well publicly my thoughts. So it was a little bit of stress for me. However I tried to prepare myself and it went over very well. Many missionaries were nice in complimenting me, which also feels good. I will tell you what, though, Elder Ketchum has an incredible gift in public speaking. He is a natural. He speaks from his heart and does so in a very calm and direct way. Let´s just say that he has mastered teaching by the Spirit. He is a great example to me and he said everything perfectly yesterday. He is incredible.
This week has been a great week. We are getting ready for transfers this next week, this next Monday, so we are excited. There will be about 13 missionaries, I think, that are going to go home at the end of this transfer and about that same number that go home in the next, including Elder Ketchum. So President Watkins is trying to prepare for these big changes. It is weird to think that about a fourth part of the mission is going to go home within the next 7 weeks, especially since a good number of those missionaries are, have been leaders in the mission.
Everything is going really well. We are anxious for a baptism. We haven´t had one for a while and are in need of finding some more good people. There are a few and we are really excited for a man from Honduras that we started teaching this last Sunday night. His sister and brother in law, he lives with them, are members with their 4 year old daughter. He is out of work and it looks like he is fairly active in the Catholic church. We, in the mission right now, invite people to be baptized in the first lesson. We usually do it in a casual way just to understand their desires and to make sure that they are really people that are elect and are going to progress. We usually say something like, ¨Si usted supiera que lo que nosotros compartimos es verdadero y que esta Iglesia es la Iglesia de Jesucristo, usted se preparía para ser bautizado en ella.¨ In this way we can see if the people we are teaching are dedicated or not.
So we invited Mario in a similar way and he said that he was willing to listen and learn about the church but baptism not so much, I actually don´t remember exactly what he said about baptism but like it was really serious or that he wasn´t really interesting in that part of the message. He seemed pretty against it. So we taught him again last night and as a mission or I think as a church, missionaries should invite people to be baptized with a date at least by the second lesson. So we did so with Mario last night and it was incredible the change in his answer this last time. We told him that we were certain that he would receive an answer from God very soon and we invited him to prepare himself to be baptized the 19th of March. We assured him that as he kept reading in the Book of Mormon, he had read until page ten in the introduction part, and kept praying, that he would be able to receive an answer. He responded, ¨Vamos a ver si estoy preparado.¨WE promised him a baptismal calendar for the next time we meet. I am happy here in the mission and I love the work. It is fun helping people come unto Christ by doing simple things.
Thank you sooo much for all that you do for me. I love you all very much and pray for you often. I love you all and hope that you have a great week. Keep praying for Mario and the other investigators that we are teaching, and please pray for me that I might be a good instrument in the hands of God.
I suppose that Kathryn is already living the dream in Provo MTC. If you write her, tell her that I say hi and that I love her. Wish her luck from me as well.
I love you all,
Love,
Élder Driggs
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