First Baptism!!

 Hey friends and family! I’ve got some good news... I got my first baptism!! It was so cool! Eunice is the one that got baptized. We found her the first day of the transfer. We had the baptismal service on Saturday. When I baptized her, we actually had to do it twice because her foot came up the first time! But, it was definitely the highlight of the week, it was so cool. It’s just awesome to think that now she can actually live with Heavenly Father someday. Something that I’ve come to learn out here is that what happens to people after this life matters to me now. We study, learn, and teach about the Plan of Salvation so much that it's really hit me out here how important it is! It's for all eternity after this life, and we only have this short time to determine what will happen forever. It's actually pretty sad to think about anybody not making it back. 

On Sunday, had her confirmation. But, at 9:15 she still wasn’t at church, and sacrament started at 9:00. We called her and she said she was walking. She lives pretty far away and she walked all the way to church! Her husband dropped her off the last two times, but the car apparently didn’t have gas, so she had to walk. I was super impressed. She’s getting a little bit of push-back from her family, mostly her husband and daughter. Her daughter is crazy and doesn’t like when Eunice leaves the house, even though she’s 40 years old. She just sits inside all day and refuses to talk to anyone. Not sure what her problem is. But, Eunice is still planning on going to church every week and said "Now that I’m baptized, I need to stay firm!" Super cool!

Something not so fun that happened this week is we lost Ingrid as an investigator. We went to her house in the morning again, but when we knocked, nobody came to the door. We knocked again and this time we heard the aunt and uncle inside and they were mad. Ingrid came to the door a few mins later and said that she wont be able to see us anymore because the aunt doesn’t want anybody knocking at their door. She also told us that the aunt made her quit her job, and that the aunt quit her own job too. Ingrid isn’t allowed to leave the house ever now, and the aunt is at home all day too. Its a super weird situation, and Elder Mascena and I are a bit worried about it. We don’t know what her aunt's reasons for doing this are. But, we think that Ingrid had a friend at her work, so we're thinking about stopping by to talk to her to find out what’s going on.

On Friday we did splits with the Zone leaders because of Eunice's baptismal interview, and I went to the Zone Leaders area with Elder Farias. It was a good day, we had some good lessons and I learned about teaching people the consequences of sin. Elder Farias isn’t afraid to tell people that they are choosing the wrong and they aren’t doing what Heavenly Father wants, so they wont be saved. It actually worked pretty well! We had a funny experience. We knocked a door that had 3 guys in it, all about 50 years old. One of them was super crazy, and started going off about Reincarnation. So we told him that we can show him that reincarnation doesn’t exist using the Bible. He said "No I don’t believe the Joseph Smith Bible you use!" 

"No we'll use your Bible. Can you get it for us?" So he went and got his Bible and we used the scripture in 1 Peter 3:19 to explain the Spirit world to him. After we showed him he got kind of quiet and said "Hmmm... makes sense..." after that he didn’t say anything bad about the church. It was super funny.

Something that I really studied this week is Jacob 5, which is about the tame and wild olive trees. One part that I really like is at the end when it talks about the servants in the vineyard. It says they were few, but they did a lot of good, and in the end they were very blessed. Verses 74 and 75 talk about the blessing that we will receive, but we need to work with all diligence. I never realized how cool this parable is until I really studied it! I’ve really learned to appreciate the scriptures out here. I wish I would’ve studied them harder at home!

So that’s it for me. Until next week everyone!

-Elder Odom