December 9, 2013

Dear Family and Friends,

     Only 16 more days until Christmas!! That´s just barely over 2 weeks! I´m super excited! The only thing that worries me is that we have transfers on the 17th. Firstly because I´ve heard it´s less fun to spend Christmas in a new area with a new companion, and secondly because the branch here asked me to sing a solo in the Christmas program at the Christmas party, and that´ll be after transfers. We´ll see what happens.

     This past week started out really well, and then ended pretty poorly. We had six or seven baptisms lined up for this weekend and the following weekend. By Saturday, for one reason or another, they all fell through--sucking us dry of progressing investigators. pook...

     The good news is that yesterday, we found a family that has already been taught, already been to church, and used to have baptismal dates, but weren´t baptized because the missionaries that taught them were both transferred at the same time, and they never put the family in the area book, so they were lost until now. That was probably really confusing, but you get the picture. 

     Also, we found out that our recent convert has been having a hard time kicking the coffee habit. My companion likes to throw me under the bus a lot. In this case, he promised our recent convert that if she could go the next day without drinking coffee, that I would sing to her and her family. Well, she didn´t drink coffee the next morning of afternoon, but gave in that evening shortly before we showed up because she had been feeling sick (probably because of the coffee addiction). The next day, however, when we showed up to talk to her, she told us that it had been a really hard day...but she didn´t drink coffee. Yup, so she called about 10 of the 17 people that live in that house to the porch, and I sang a Christmas song for them using my Portuguese hymn book. They really liked it.

     That´s about all I have this week. Sorry it´s such a boring letter this time ( do I say that a lot?). But I´ll talk to you guys soon. Love you!

                                                        com carinho,

                                                       - Elder Crapo