Week 56 - Bowling Green

Hola mi familia!

What a crazy week! But nothing out of the ordinary really happened!

So my mission got approved to be an online proselyting mission, so we have Facebook now! I'm super excited for all the possibilities this opens up. It's been kinda weird, but we are getting used to it. It makes it so much easier to keep daily contact with investigators and to get members Skyped into lessons or to even find people to teach. It's going to be such a cool tool to use. 

Otherwise we've been working with Amali and Christian a ton, we went over everyday at 8 and taught them. But they can't get baptized this week because their mom's brother passed away and they are leaving on Saturday to go to Georgia for a week. But they will get baptized. Just in a few more weeks. They came to church again and I think they really enjoyed it. 

The ward I'm in is an English ward with a Spanish group attached to it. So every other week we have Spanish sacrament and it's really fun because the members here are super cool. One of my favorites is a recent convert. He is an ex navy seal and he's the coolest guy ever. And his humor reminds me a lot of John green. Just to give an idea of how he is. But I'm super excited to serve here. The members are excited to work! And Bowling Green is like provo, if it were off on its own and a little more hillbilly. It's the best. 

Other than that the normal grind happened, nothing too exciting, but it was still a great week! I hope everything is going great with yall!

Love yall!

🇺🇸Elder Williams🇲🇽

Week 55 - Bowling Green

Hola mi familia!

This week has been great. I absolutely love it here. I'm so excited for this transfer and the upcoming months here in Kentucky. This week has had its ups and downs, but overall just great.

So for the down side, we have an investigator, Luis, who was supposed to get baptized this past Friday. But the day of his baptismal interview, some leaders from his church passed by to see him at work. They basically taught a lot of false things to him. One was that he had already received all the ordinances that all churches require and that because he was no longer going to their church, that was the reason for his girlfriend leaving and taking their kids. It really scared him and he doesn't want to be baptized anymore. Or At least he wants more time. We tried to teach him the authority and we brought up acts 19: 1-6 with him. We felt the spirit testify to him that it was true and it clicked in his eyes, that it really does matter how you get baptized, but he then denied it. So we are going to give him a little more time, but we are both feeling that if he continues how he is, we are going to have to put a pause on him for awhile. We feel it to be the best for him. But that's it with the sad. 

The good news this week is we have found a lot of cool people! We have been trying to sift through the list of investigators that we have and we've been able to cut it down. 

We also had a couple great lessons with the ramirez family. It is a single mom who was baptized 20 years ago and doesn't really know why. She has two kids, 13 and 9, who are both investigators now. They are the coolest. They had been taught the first lesson and we taught them the plan of salvation on Friday. At the end of the lesson, I felt that we should set a baptismal date with them. I also felt that there was no need to wait. So we set a date with the two kids for the 15th of September! So not this Friday, but the next. They are pretty excited about it, and we are going to be working with them daily to make sure they reach their goal. But it's going to be great!

Elder Hamilton is really awesome! He's super humble and really wants to improve! I already love him so much. I'm excited for the time here with him. He's originally from Colorado, lived in California for awhile and then two months before he came out his family moved to American fork. They live right across the street from the temple. So really close to us. He's been out for one less transfer than me, but we should be going home about the same times because of the start time of byu. He did gymnastics and dance in high school so he's a very high energy kid. We get along really well so far. And I'm excited to see what I can learn from him. 

Love yall!

Have a great week!

🇺🇸Elder Williams🇲🇽

Week 54 - Watch out Kentucky, Elder Williams is coming!!!

Hola mi familia!

Well this week flew by! I don't even know why. A few of the days had a couple unexpected things happened that made our days feel like nothing really happened. 

So first off. We got transfer calls, and I'm heading to Bowling Green, Kentucky! I'm super excited! My companion is elder Hamilton, and as of right now he's the only Spanish elder that I don't know. So I'm excited to tell you all about him next week! 

Then Saturday morning Maria and Daniel got baptized! It was a super awesome service. And Maria went all the way under the first time! Which is great, because we were worried she would flail around because of her fear of water. But it all went well. They were confirmed yesterday at church. Just super cool stuff. 

Alondra and Jose are progressing really well! We had 2 lessons with them this week, and one of them we taught half of the plan of salvation with the bishop but got into a really deep doctrine discussion. Then on Saturday we finished the rest of the lesson and had a really good 2 hour lesson. We tried to leave, but they had more questions and wanted us to stay longer. So we did. Then they came to church yesterday and stayed for the full 3 hours. And today we are having family home evening with them at a members house. So I have a feeling I'll be making a quick trip back here pretty soon to see them get baptized. I'm super excited for them. 

Now for the unexpected things. It was mostly Thursday. So we had a planned service project of handing out 300 flyers per companionship in our zone at every door in East Nashville. It is for a family history fair that one of the wards is putting on. So we had three hours to do it. It was basically just running up and down streets. Then after we ran to the hospital, because we got a call from one of the part member/ less active families that we have been working with. The dad was in the hospital because he has kidney failure. So we spent a long time looking for him. Especially because we went to the wrong Saint Thomas at first. Then for dinner we were heading down to pick up the other elders and we were stopped in traffic. And then a big white Tacoma rear ended us. So we pulled off and dealt with all that. We had to wait 2 hours for the cops to get there, which wasnt good because it let the Hispanics that hit us really worry about getting deported. So we tried to calm their nerves. They got out just fine. But that put us until 7:30. And so we ran home and ate really quick and ran to the lesson with alondra, Jose and bishop. Then the next couple days we had to go around doing stuff for the repairs of the car. Fun stuff. I've been getting a lot of calls from these different therapy places that want me to come in and get a free check up. But I keep telling them I'm going to bowling Green and they just get confused and hang up. Haha

I'm now currently sitting in bed with some stomach bug that hit like half the ward yesterday. So sorry if this email is bad or anything, I'm a little out of it. 

Love yall

🇺🇸Elder Williams🇲🇽