Week 18, Thanksgiving Blessings

Thanksgiving Dinner!

  Well this week was a pretty awesome week, being Elder Castaneda's last week, as well as Thanksgiving week.  It was a great time to be able to reflect on all of the things that I have in my life, and how blessed I have really been.  Just the fact that I was grown up in an active LDS family is one of the biggest blessings I could have, the gospel of Jesus Christ truly is real happiness on the earth today. 

 On Thanksgiving in the morning we got to play in a Turkey Bowl with the English wards, a lot of people came, so we had a really great time.  It was nice playing football again, just because we normally only play Futbol.  After the turkey bowl we went to our first thanksgiving dinner with the Bowen's a family in our branch and we also ate with some other families from another ward.  We had a ton of really good food, and were able to have a really good time.  Then after we had our Second thanksgiving dinner with the Lopez's who are another family in our branch.  They had a lighter thanksgiving dinner, which was good or else we might have exploded, but it was really good, all the food was cooked well.  It was great eating good food, this week we were actually fed almost every day and sometimes twice a day which was rare but awesome.  A lot of people were sad to see Castaneda go, he has been in the Branch for 9 months!  

Baptism day for Eddie, Victor, and Brittany 

   As great as Thanksgiving was, the real highlight of the week was the miracle that we had of having 3 baptisms on Saturday!  It's kind of a long story, but Elder Castaneda had taught the mom (who is the soon to be wife of the Elders Quorum president) 6 months or so ago.  Her and her kids have been living in Nashville, but continued to have the missionaries over.  They moved back here just a few weeks ago, and we had kind of talked about baptizing the kids but we weren't sure when because the Mom (Sandra) wanted to be baptized with the kids.  She is waiting for a divorce paper, and it could come any day or in a few months.  So we received a call this week from Sandra saying that the kids (Eddie, Victor,  Brittany) want to be baptized this weekend.  We had the baptism and everything went super well!  I was able to baptize Eddie and Victor and then on Sunday I got to confirm Brittany as well (all in Espanol)!  I said all the important stuff right, so I didn't have to repeat it which was nice.  For our goal as a mission we got 89 baptism which is 16 baptisms more than the highest month before!  Way awesome to see the hard work pay off, it shows that sacrifice will bring blessings for sure.

Baptism of Israel by the North Misionaries

Well as of an hour ago we said goodbye to our companions for the last time.  Me and Elder Heaton will serve together until this Wednesday at transfers.  I have an idea of who I will be serving with but we don't officially find out until Wednesday.  I'm really excited to continue to work hard and find more people to bring unto Christ!  Oh and I will be staying in my area for sure, same apartment and everything. 

It sounds like that you had a great Thanksgiving week with everyone in town.  Well I don't have too much time, but have an awesome week. I love you so much and thank you for the email.