A golden contact...finally

Hello family,

Yes like you said in your email, I'm about 25% done my mission.  Hard to believe it has gone so fast!

That’s awesome that Sarah and Christina did so well in their provincials.  Also, for dad, my P-Day schedule is pretty open.  We do emails at night, and then go proselyting.  But before that we do our shopping, laundry, and play some card games.  I've gotten all the people in my apartment addicted to Rook!!  As far as your question in relation to conference, I'll probably be watching at the church.

In response to your question about Amanda, it has been really unfortunate, but we have not yet had the opportunity to speak with her again, so that’s really been unfortunate.  But on the other hand, we had an appointment with another investigator who was AMAZING.  But she's got a bit of a story.  This is how it goes:  We were on one of the streets in Peekskill, trying to find a house (that ended up not existing), and so Elder Lopez decided that we would go knock on the door of a family he had taught before, but they had moved, so we contacted the Lady who lived there.  Her name is Nube.  She seemed pretty cool.  We set up a time to go see her and then continued on the day.  Her appointment day came, but when we went, she wasn’t there, so we called her and talked to her, but we weren’t able to set a time then.  So... she asked us to call her later that day.  Unfortunately we both forgot to do so... he he, our bad.  Anyways, about ten days go by, and we don’t have any contact with her.  Then one day, we're being juked left and right, so were kinda running out of plans, and we run across her name again.  So we called her back.  This was when we figured she was a little better than we thought, because she was saying that she wasn't sure what happened, because we had never called her back, and she was waiting for us (she had lost our number).  We made another appointment with her, and she juked us again (her son was sick).  Once again we set up an appointment.

The date is now March 21.  This all started about the 3rd of March, and we have an appointment with her.  We knock on the door, and to our dismay she's not home!  We're not sure what to do, so we call her, and to our joy, she was just on her way home from buying groceries.  So we wait till she gets home.  So we go in, and start getting to know her.  She's an Ecuadorian from a town about and hour or two outside of Cuenca.  She has two children, a 6yr old boy and a 4 yr old girl, and has been living here for 7 yrs.  Her family is all Catholic (which as soon as someone tells you they’re from Ecuador, you know they're Catholic).  Anyways, so we're getting to know her, and she commits herself to coming to church without us even asking her to.  Sufficeth to say, she seems pretty dang good.

So we start the lesson.  The hard part is her two kids.  They both have ADHD, and are a nightmare to teach with.  I mean it, as cute as little kids can be, they are of Satan.  He uses them in such a way that their parents can’t focus on what we have to say.  So I pretty much start focusing entirely on the kids, and eventually get them to settle down enough that I can keep their attention, and Nube could focus while Elder Lopez taught her.  So about halfway through the lesson, the question of baptism came up, and we answered it pretty frankly, that her Baptism wasn’t valid, and that she needed to be baptized by someone who holds the Priesthood, which amazingly she was fine with.  She seemed rather excited to hear that.  But the pivotal moment was when we were talking about the Book of Mormon, and testifying to her that the answers to her questions were in there, and that if she read and prayed she would receive and answer if what we were teaching her was true.  We continued a little more, and then told her that she could have the book.  At this point she almost broke down into tears.  The way she reacted when we said the book was hers, was almost like no one had ever given her something so special.

Elder Lopez and I are so happy to have found her, but Elder Lopez is a little disappointed, only because he seems to find these elect people just before he's going to be leaving an area.  But we're both quite sure that she'll be baptized next month.  Finding her was just such a testimony that there are people out there, and not just that, but I know that she was a blessing that we received for all the work that we have been doing, and the diligence with which we have been doing the work, even though it's been hard. 

Anyways, I've gotta get going but I just want to all to know that I love you, and I hope you have a good time in Las Vegas,  but... unfortunately you’re not going to have as much fun there as I am having here.

Con Amor, Elder Dilling

This is one tough tree!