Transfers

Hello, hello, family and friends.  Thank you to Jakins for the letter and Mom and Dad for the Valentine's Day candy!  So today is transfer day and I am...drum roll please...STAYING.  Super excited about that.  Elder Flores got transferred, which was less than exciting.  He is actually our Zone Leader now, which is still in our district.  It will be good to still have him around.  We learned a lot together.  My new companion is Elder Bennett. He has 6 months left in his mission.  He was a trainer before coming to my area.  He was in our zone, so we already know each other.  Zones here are a lot smaller than the zones in Texas.  We only have 18 in our zone.  He is from Alabama and his Spanish sounds really good.  He's the new District Leader for our district.  It looks like it will be a good transfer.

Jeaneth got confirmed this week!  It was such a good experience.  Elder Flores confirmed her.  She wants to go to the temple to be baptized for her grandma.  As of now, we are having a hard time finding her grandma's name and I don't know if they know all the required information.  So we'll be working with the family history people this week to get that all figured out.  Grandmas, if you have any suggestions I'd love your help.

We were planning on having a baptism for Armando this week.  Summary: it didn't happen.  So at first, we didn't want to shove them into the marriage, so we were leaving it to them to get the marriage license.  On Wednesday, we started jumping in to see if they wanted to do it.  They seemed on board, so we got their stuff translated and we went to the clerk's office on Thursday to get the license.  We were 20 minutes late, so that was a bummer.  Wait, it gets worse.  We thought, "okay, we'll come back tomorrow."  Side story real quick:  Armando has been unemployed for the last 2 months.  Alright, so Armando tells us that he got a job offer to start on Friday and if he didn't show up to work on Friday, he would lose the chance to work there.  So he was forced to decide to pass on the job to be able to get his marriage license, or take the job and delay everything.  He took the job.  We put in a lot of time and effort this week to help this baptism happen because he has been investigating on and off for over a year.  That one hurt pretty bad, to be honest.  I'm not really sure what is going to happen from here.  He works all the hours the clerk's office is open.  Ya, it hurt...and still hurts.

Happy news, Raul and Rosy are amazing as always!  Still no baptism date, but they started listening to Oct 2012 conference.  They really liked the "Ask the missionaries they can help you" talk and the "know it, live it, love it" talk.  In Elders quorum on Sunday, Raul randomly spit out a bunch of awesome stuff about being instruments in the hands of God and helping be the answer to somebody's prayer.  I think he may have been listening to President Monson.  We also took Raul and Rosy to the "Despedida" activity.  This is the testimony meeting with all the outgoing missionaries.  They got to meet President Becerra, which they thought was awesome.  Visits with them always lifts my spirits.  I really hope that they can get everything pulled together in the next six weeks so that I'll still be in the ward to see their baptism.

So recently I've been studying a lot about becoming.  The key to becoming is not just doing the right things, but doing them for the right reasons.  It's not just about going to church, reading the scriptures, and praying.  It's about doing all those things for the right reasons.  There's a big difference between doing these things for the right reasons and just going through the motions.  We will not become anything if we are just going through the motions.  It's been a cool week of study.  Alma 36:3-27 the account of Alma the Younger's conversion.  Reading the account after helping people through the repentance process was really cool.  His account is so powerful.

Hope all is well, family and friends!  I'd love to hear from you all.  Just to clarify, my address is still the same.  Love you all.

Elder Tanner Christensen