Hi guys!
Quite a lot happened this past week. Firstly, the work is still going about the same pace it's been going. It's not bad, we are teaching, and it's going well, but we are desperate for more investigators to
teach. And we didn't find any. But we did get Katie (our new investigator from the previous week) on date! That was an awesome lesson. We taught The Plan of Salvation and we planned the baptismal
invite really well, and Elder Cockerham delivered it just about perfectly. Throughout the lesson, we both said some things that I'm pretty sure were inspired, our fellowshipper was great, and the Spirit
was super strong. Katie is on date for the 18th of February. It still feels weird that I won't be here for that.
We also did get a few more referrals. I'm not sure how solid they are, but it's at least something to keep us going.
Khan was tricky this week. On Tuesday, a mouse had gotten himself caught in an empty trash can (he was walking and just sort of fell in) and we thought we'd finally caught Khan. But then three things came to mind: 1) We've seen Khan a lot, and this mouse looked smaller than how we remembered him, 2) This mouse was caught in an area of the house where Khan never hangs out, and 3) Khan is a grand master champion of avoiding detainment, but this mouse literally caught himself, in other words, this mouse seemed a little amateur. So I set some bait near the two places Khan tends to frequent, to see if they would get eaten. If they disappeared that would mean Khan is still in the house, but if they didn't, that would mean we had indeed caught him. So we released the mouse we caught into Cedar Canyon to live out his days in the wild, and for the whole day, that bait was entirely undisturbed, so we thought we may have actually caught him. But sure enough, we'd been
bamboozled! Early the next morning, I heard scampering noises, and when I checked, one of the pieces of bait was gone. Later that day, the other bait had been disturbed, but not eaten, and then by the end of the day, that one was gone too. The evidence was conclusive: we didn't catch Khan, we caught his crony (or maybe just some poor sap just passing through). I like to think it was a set up. Khan knew we were after him, so he got this other mouse to be his fall guy and make it LOOK like we had got Khan, but actually it was just a clever decoy. I know mice probably don't think like that at all, but it's more fun to look at it that way. Plus Khan is pretty smart... Anyway, a few days later we saw him again gorging himself on some of our cookies (which we didn't want anyway, so I guess it's just as well someone's enjoying them). So yeah. He's still here. Hopefully I'll be able to catch him before I go home.
Now getting back to more spiritual things, we had a great weekend. On Saturday we had Ashton's baptism. Unfortunately, Quentin apparently isn't getting baptized anytime soon because he's still in Arizona, and apparently his parents are dodging the law or something. So that really stinks. But at least we did get one baptism. And it went so well! There was a huge turnout. We actually had to do it in the chapel since the room we usually hold baptismal services in was too small for everyone. He had a lot of family members, a lot of people from school, and a big ward turnout as well. And Katie came to the baptism too, so it was cool to have an investigator there to learn and also see what it actually is that she'll be doing in a month. It was just really great. I'll include pictures with this email. It's myself, Elder Cockerham, Ashton, and his uncle who baptized him.
And that was actually my last baptism as a missionary. Nobody else is scheduled (or ready) to get baptized before I leave in just over a week. I'm glad it went so well. And Ashton is just awesome so he's a fitting final mission convert.
Sunday was good too. We had Ashton's confirmation which went really well. Again, a lot of good family and ward support. And later we got to observe a ward split. Up until now, the Hamilton Fort Ward had been enormous. But yesterday they split it into the (new) Hamilton Fort Ward and the South Mountain Ward. It'll be cool I think to see if that stirs up any missionary opportunities that were previously hidden due to the ward being so huge, boundary wise and population wise. It will
definitely provide some opportunities for the wards to reactivate people, since now there's more need for callings, and again, less room to hide.
There were also some really good thoughts shared by some of the speakers yesterday. The theme for the whole stake seemed to be The Sabbath Day. I'd like to share one thought I really liked. If you had
a day to hang out with Jesus Christ, what would you do with Him? Where would you go with Him? What would you talk about? Well, even though we don't get hang out with Him in person just yet, that's really what the Sabbath Day is. It's a day to spend some personal time with The Savior. We should imagine the opportunity to literally hang out with Jesus and what we'd want to do with Him, and then do those things for the Sabbath. There aren't a whole lot of specific things we're told to do or not to do on Sunday. It's supposed to be a day of rest and of worship and we should try our best not to work or purchase things on the Sabbath if we can help it. The only thing we're really commanded to do specifically is to go to church and take the sacrament. The rest of the day, we have a lot of personal choice as to how we're going to make the Sabbath special. So, what would you do if got the opportunity to hang out with Jesus for a day?
Well that's all for today. And I can hardly believe it, but I only have one week left. Well, a week and a couple days, but yeah. That's scary. And exciting. And sad. And just plain crazy. It's a lot of things. But regardless, I'm going to make this final week as fantastic as I can. Have a great week everyone!
-Elder Oswald
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