So my e-mail is coming Tuesday this week because yesterday the libraries were closed. Yes it snowed about 6 inches on Thursday and it's snowing again today! I think that means it's officially winter. Snow isn't as fun as a missionary. Luckily though, it hasn't been as bad as last year (yet). I'm really relieved that the grad school stuff is done. Now I can have normal preparation days. I've had a little bit of a cold this week which is mostly just annoying. I hope it goes away soon.
This week has been interesting and has had it's ups and downs. The biggest blow this week was that Maria Mendoza (one of our investigators who's been progressing pretty well and said she wanted to get baptized) moved without telling us where and since we only had her house number we can't get a hold of her. We're not really sure why she didn't tell us. So that was really hard for us. We're a little bit closer to putting a baptismal date with Jose. Now he's saying 2 or 3 months instead of "summer". So that's a small improvement. We were pushing him really hard to set a goal for baptism at our last lesson but he still said he'd just let us know when he's ready. He went to visit his daughter this week and ended up going to church in Elgin with her. But he told us he likes it here better because he's used to it. So that's good :)
We had a lot of less active members at church this week! Three families from the elders area and one from ours. On Friday we'd left just a small note on the door of this couple's door (Alicia and Carlos). They said it helped motivate them to decide to come to church on Sunday! It was her first time coming in about a month and I've never actually met him so it was his first time in a LONG time. They recently got into a car accident too where their car flipped over a bunch so that also might have given them a little motivation :). We're hoping they'll continue to come. We had another really good lesson with another less active yesterday. She stopped coming because of all the gossiping and she "just couldn't stand it anymore". She says she knows she needs to come back especially because her son just turned 8. We had a really nice lesson with her and she says she going to come to church! So hopefully we'll see her Sunday too.
We found an old investigator (Rosa) this week who were being taught about a year and a half ago and had come to church with her "esposo" (Juan) and children for about 5 months. They stopped coming because of the gossip and "hypocrisy" of some of the members. I think gossip is probably one of the most destructive (non-physical) forces ever. So they're like all the less active members only not members. So I guess that makes them "less-active investigators". They never got baptized before because they we're waiting on divorce papers from Mexico to get married. We met with Rosa on Wednesday and she told us everything. She says she's willing to get over it but that Juan really wants nothing to do with the church anymore. It's a really sad situation. They both read through the entire book of Mormon and it's really obvious that Rosa still has a testimony of it (we're not sure about Juan). She got really sad when she started talking about how they used to be so excited about getting sealed in the temple. We told her that she can still have all those things but that she (and Juan) might have to start with something a little bit smaller (i.e. starting to read and pray again) but that starting to do those small things would help them both get over the negative feelings they have. She admitted that they had stopped reading and praying since they stopped coming to church as well and said that she'd like to start over again. So we have really high hopes for her! and hopefully we can meet with Juan sometime too - he's going to be a little harder though I can tell. Also they are planning to get married in February!
Well I hope that everything goes well for you all this week! Love you!
Hermana West
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