mois de septembre

Photo from last month's mission leader council. All the zone leaders and sister training leaders.

Hello family! Can you believe it is September already? This week went by pretty quickly.

I don't have much time to write, we're going to go to a "treasure hunt" competition between zones at a botanical garden on the other side of the island in about an hour, and we still have to go do our shopping for the week, so I will be brief!

This week went well. We fixed another baptism for the 17th of September with V! V is a woman who is the step daughter of a member in our ward. She came to C and M's baptisms last week and was really touched. This week we continued teaching her and she said she wanted to get baptized but didn't feel ready. I felt so guided by the spirit to just start talking about the word of wisdom. I was taking a guess that she didn't feel ready because she smokes or something. I was right. She smokes about 7 cigarettes a day. So we made a calendar with her to decrease 1 cigarette per day, in other words to quit smoking in about 1 week's time. She agreed, then agreed to be baptized the week after! Yay! The church is true haha

Another cool experience: I was on a split in my sector of Orofero with Elder F, an Elder who just got transferred into our zone last week. We were teaching an ami who is not at all interested in listening to us. We were teaching her and her family members, but I was mainly focusing on her. I was trying to figure out what her needs were and then teach accordingly. I prayed and felt prompted to start talking about eternal families. That made no sense to me, according to her needs, but I was like "what the heck this lady isn't listening to anything we're saying, I'll talk about eternal families." So I just started going off on eternal families. The lady got even less interested, to the point where I stopped talking mid sentence and was about to say "thanks for your time, can we end with a prayer?" And then one of her family members, a lady, said "I want an eternal family!" When she said that I got the chills through my body. The spirit totally told me to talk about eternal families! The lady then went off about how she has been in the world too long and wants to come back and have the blessing of an eternal family, etc. She then committed to come to church this Sunday... and she came! The Lord knows his children.

This weekend we have the baptism of E, a 10 year old girl we've been teaching. Her parents are not at all interested in church, they drink and smoke and everything, but they have been pushing her to take the lessons and get baptized. This week, they came and talked to us a little. They're coming to the baptismal service! I hope to commit them to start taking the lessons afterwards. The whole family is so potential! It's amazing how my views of certain things have changed on a mission. Now when I see people who drink and smoke and live in sin, I see it as potential. It's amazing what the Savior can do to people's lives when they decide to follow their Lord. I know Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer.

Love you all, hope you have a great week! Wish I had more time to tell you more, but voilà.

Sincerely,

Elder Barlow

P.S. Elder S finishes his mission next Monday, so I will be getting a new companion! Pray that I get a good one! Haha