30 de Abríl

This was a great week for us in Valencia! We had 2 baptisms, the two kids from that family. They are so great! Their family is already one of the strongest in the ward haha. It turns out that the dad didn't get his name presented so he couldn't receive the priesthood in time. Elder Dayes baptized one of them and I the other, a neat experience. Victor the Ward Mission leader did the confirmations on sunday. There was every companionship set up for the 27th with a baptism, but a lot of them fell through, so it only ended up being us, the elders from barrio 1, and the pueblos like castellón and such. It was a good week for the mission, we had 25!!! baptisms and 23 were confirmed. We reached our weekly goal for the first time this year! Woo!! We had a super great lesson with them yesterday and watched the full version of the Joseph Smith video, and they loved it. My testimony of Joseph Smith as a true prophet of the Lord was strengthened and felt the Spirit bear powerful witness to us all. It was a great experience! One of their friends who we've been teaching said she'd come to church and didn't (because she slept through the alarm she said) but when we stopped by later in the day Clemxynn and Joy had already been there for a few hours to see why and had been talking about the message which the youth we brought along with us shared, all uncoordinated. We all saw the Lords hand in this and they were pretty convinced that God wanted them to keep following this path!
We've had lots of 'heated' scriptural disscussions with the Testigos, 7th day adventists (who believe the sabbath should still be on saturdays) and some who knows whats. It motivated me to study pretty diligently in the Bible and I've been compiling lots of scripture lists. Things like that drive me crazy, people teaching that the scriptures say this or that when its a bunch of balogna.(Hows that for English spelling?) We had a referral to visit a family of Testigos who the member says he works with and would accept us in. Well, he accepted us in his house and was super nice and friendly, just that he wasted like 2 hours of our time in a pueblo that takes 45 min to get to trying to convince us that Jehovah is God the Father and Jesus is different, and that He doesn't have a body, and the whole 144000 saved thing, etc. So we tried to explain a few scriptures, but he wasn't really interested in changing, so we kinda just gave up and left. So we try not to be too hard on those children of God, because this guy was pretty nice, just pretty deceived by slights of men. They avoid missionaries like the plague though, and always give us weird looks. The seventh day Adventists basically agreed with a lot of what we teach, except they are so caught up with the Sabbath on Saturday that they don't care to talk about anything else, and don't really believe in priesthood or prophets. So I guess you could say I've been gaining lots of cultural experience.
Elder Dayes is being transferred to Barrio 3 as a zone leader, so I will be getting a new companion today, Elder Shindler. I was a little disappointed to hear because we've been doing great together and having fun, but I hear good things about my new companion too, and I'll still see Elder Dayes a lot. I'm out of time now, but I hope you have a great week!