Week 26 - Christmas Week!

Well I'm super excited to have my first Christmas here in Argentina! It will be interesting staying up later than 10:30 to do some fun stuff with a family in our area and the next night just Elder Linares and I partying it up.

Well while we were in Paysandu, we had a really good time living in the house of Elder Rolon and Jacobson with the other 2 missionaries in Argentina, Elder Davis and Elder Enlow. Of course, we had to order pizza, right? We made Elder Enlow who has the least amount of time between the 6 of us order the pizza because we thought he would need the practice, right?  Honestly he started out going really good but at one point he asked what toppings they had, and slowly his face just started dropping and then he's like "Aww..... !" and then Elder Rolon steals the phone and apologizes to the lady at the pizza place and just says that his companion is gringo and doesn't understand anything, and then she just straight up hung up on him.  So we had to call back to order the pizza obviously, but I just thought I'd share because we are not letting Elder Enlow live that one down.

Most importantly though, Elder Linares really applied some counsel we got in our little zone reunion on P-day about how to contact and find new investigators. In Montevideo I was doing really well with that, but my first week here we only found 4 new investigators and I was kind of upset about it. The cool thing is though, Elder Linares and I learned, practiced, and then applied in real time. This week, only working from Thursday to Sunday, we found 13 new investigators, more than I've found in an entire week of work (before, my record was 10). When we are ready to put in the work to improve our own skills in whatever it may be, the Lord will always be there to make up the rest. Us + The Lord = More!

This week we also gave a baptismal date to Cristian and Flavio, a step-father and son. They have more members of the family, but they weren't there for that charla (discussion) and we're hoping to talk to them later, but we're super excited for these 2. They also came to church yesterday which is super awesome! Often the problem for why people don't get baptized is that they just don't come, so the fact that they were willing to come was awesome!

Our Zone also bumped up the Normas de Excelencia that we have as weekly goals.

New Investigators changed from 7 to 8.

Church attendance changed from 3 to 4.

Baptismal dates stays at 5.

Our zone also has the goal to have 6 baptisms in the month of January, the most our zone has had in the last year for monthly baptisms was 6, so while the goal is 6, we are seriously looking to absolutely crush that number and it's looking quite possible for now.

Well that's pretty much it for now! Nos Vemos!

-Elder Martin