It's a Nice Day for a White Dunking

On Saturday, we had FIVE baptisms! Said that we would in last week's email, so it's not a huge surprise, but it's still cool! The people baptized are shown in the attached pictures. The family has been working with the church more-or-less since November. A young man in the family heard in passing that one of his friends in school was a Mormon and, not knowing what a Mormon was, found himself on Mormon.org downloading the Book of Mormon. After reading about it and praying about it, he walked into church, went up to the missionaries who he had absolutely no contact with before, and said that he wanted to be baptized. On our sheets, he was lasted as "Miracle" under the "How Contacted" section. He was baptized in January. Soon after, his family, which includes his younger brothers, his mom, and his grandparents, all started to come to church and began taking the lessons. On March 8, 2014, they too were baptized into the church, and were then confirmed the next day (yesterday) into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I got to stand in the circle for that, which was pretty cool.

Elder Davidson did all the baptisms, and the family had our ward mission leader do all the confirmations. That took a chunk out of Sacrament meeting, and we still had 3 speakers and a musical number after that. Plus all the paperwork which pulled us out of our other church meetings.

We had a couple things happen last week that were interesting. First, we had an exchange with the Copper Hill West elders. I stayed in the area, and Elder Coles from my MTC district became my companion. We had the car, and I got to drive. I don't know how we managed it, but we have the newest car in the mission. We're driving a 2014 Ford Fusion, and it's really nice! We just got the odometer to 1000 miles today. Our work that day was amazing! We hit our contact goal, 27 out of 25, and we got 5 potential investigators. Miracles always happen on exchanges, and I'll be going on plenty as Elder Davidson is the District Leader.

A funny thing happened while Elder Davidson and I were trying to visit some potential investigators a few days ago. While waiting to see if one would answer her door (she didn't), we heard a man across the street start yelling at us. We look over and he's yelling at us to leave the neighborhood as it's "private property". He even threatened us multiple times that he would call the Sheriff on us. The neighborhood, as we already knew, had private roads. According to the signs outside the neighborhood, that's the only private thing about it. Walking, soliciting, and proselyting are completely allowed. Gated communities are the only places we can't proselyte in. We actually wanted an officer to come, but that's partly because we wanted a story to tell. We both have our papers certifying us as preachers, and we weren't doing anything illegal, so if an officer had come, we'd have been in the right. Also, luckily, many officers around here are Mormon, or at least respect the work we do and would not do anything to disrupt the work. We did stay in the area for another 10-20 minutes, but no one ever showed up to put us in cuffs and haul us away. So sad.

Love,

Elder DeFord