Golden Opportunities in the MCA: Baptism and the deaf guy (June 2, 2014)

Well! it was a great week! we taught Patricio a few more times but he really was just super duper prepared! I felt really good about it! He has lots of desires to serve, lots and lots of faith, and a good friend in the church, along with most of the other members that he is already really close to. its been awesome! Golden investigator! He got baptized 3 weeks after we met him. He is fantastic. Massive jokester, he likes to make people laugh and he likes to make fun of me! but we have a good time. For his baptism, everything was prepared well! we had lots of members invited, we were filling up the font on time... the biggest thing that was a problem was that the baptismal page wasnt al the way filled out but we got that done in time. everything just went really really smoothly. The 4 Elders did a quartet of Nearer my God to Thee, but in spanish. and it was really cool! it wasnt perfect but they all basically loved it to pieces. that was fun. I have some pictures! My camera Got here on Thursday! i was SO happy! so here are a few pics for ya.. not very many but there they are. Patricio is next to me. and Jorge Cid, who gave us the referral and is his best friend in the branch is on the Other side, it was a great time. All is well with Patricio. Im very grateful to have the blessing of being able to teach him.

The rest of this week has been just normal i guess! we are thinging about moving out of our apartment to try and be a little more effective at night... sometimes we get back to the pension and just start talking instead of writing in the journal and such, so we will see how that goes, i think we are gonna move to another aprtment in the same complex and the other Elders will move out a little farther away. closer to their area. Its been happy here in vallenar. Im pretty sure i only have 4 weeks left here so i am going to try and take as much advantage of that as i can. the mission is just cruising by!

This week we had some fun times, we found this less active guy who is COMPLETELY deaf. he welcomed us in, he talks fine, and he talked to us for a while and we could ask simple questions and he would read our lips, but if he couldnt read it, we had to write it down for him to see. we wanted to share a message with him but i didnt know how that was going to work out... then i remembered that i had videos! i was stoked! so we asked him if we could watch a video. and we put it in and went to turn the subtitles on so that he could understand it too.... the movie is only in spanish, but the subtitles were ONLY in english! what?!?!?! manufacturer error. but thus is life. he told us to just leave them on and that he would just try. we shared the video and then talked a tiny bit about it. or, he talked to us about it, then we wanted to invite him to come to church... usually when you invite people to do things you try and help them see the importance of it and promise them blessing and such but we could barely talk to him! so we wrote on the paper " we know coming to church and reading the book of Mormon brings blessings. will you come to church with us?" and he said yes! wow! i told him i would sit next to him and write stuff down for him, i was thinking about trying to learn sign language, but he doesnt want to even try it. well... anyways, he didnt actually come to church, but it was fun! we also found a mamita! or a person to cook for us! that is going to be a huge help! im so excited for that! no more dishes, or spending an hour cooking every day. but im really glad i got to do it. today, I, alone, cooked fajitas... not that cooking fajitas is anything special, but doing the rice the corn the peppers the beans and the chicken all at the same time is a rush! but it was fun! i have learned a lot a lot about cooking.

I love this branch, im going to be really sad to leave it... but i really just love all of these experiences. there are some REALLY hard times, but there are so many more great ones. i am just learning and grwoing and feeling the spirit so much. i love feeling the spirit. I have grown so much in the last 2 months its just crazy.

I love you all tons! i will make sure to be sending more pictures!

Elder Gold