August 31, 2009

Hey family,

It was a good week this last week. I didn’t sleep a whole lot so I’m sick now. My companion sleeps on the top bunk and moves a lot when he sleeps and the bed creaks like crazy. It has been rough in that area but other than that it’s been awesome. We meet our goals for the week and taught a lot of good lessons. Our investigator Mauricio is going down (getting wet baby). We taught him an awesome lesson about the atonement and baptism. Our mission president told us all to focus on the atonement in our personal study and with our investigators, so I've been trying to do that more. It has been awesome because it has strengthened my testimony and brought more power to the lessons. When you think of Christ the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind is, he died for our sins. Yeah, that's correct he did, he died for everyone’s sins. The thing people forget is that our salvation isn't free. Christ’s atonement isn't free. We have to do our part first for his atonement to take place in our lives. Well what is our part? We need to take upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ which is done through baptism. In the scriptures it always talks about the repentance and then baptism. We need to teach faith unto repentance which leads us to be baptized. If I could only help people feel the need to repent they would ask to be baptized. That's how it was done in the scriptures and that's how it should be done today. Anyways, we taught the atonement linked to baptism to Mauricio and committed him for the 6th of September. He kinda gave us an answer of yeah he wants to but has fear. We just told him pray and ask the lord if he wants you baptized this date and I promise you he'll give you an answer. We went back 2 days later to see how he was doing. He had just bought a little DVD player so I pulled out my DVDs’ and asked which one he wanted to watch. He pulled out the restoration, we watched it. He then pulled out finding faith in Christ and we watched that. We talked after shared our testimonies and asked if he had prayed. He told us he had, and he told his wife who is in Ecuador the night before he was going to get baptized and she gave him the ok. He had received an answer to his prayers. He had to come to Church yesterday in order to be baptized the 6th because you have to come 3 times before baptism. He worked from midnight Saturday to 11am Sunday and couldn’t make it to our 10 o'clock church. We went over last night and rescheduled the date to the 13th. The last Sunday of the transfer. He said he will come to church this week for sure and I’m praying it all works out. One thing that I have noticed is that when an investigator has a date for baptism before receiving an answer that it’s true, they pray and always receive an instant answer. We receive no witness till after the trial of our faith. We also taught a less actives boyfriend Rommel again last night and taught a very powerful lesson on the plan of Salvation. It was amazing. We need him to receive and answer and hopefully can get him baptized the 13th with the less actives 9 year old daughter. We'll see how the week goes with them. He came to church a couple weeks ago and didn’t like sacrament meeting. Said it wasn’t very reverent which at times it’s not because most Spanish people here don’t discipline their kids. We're trying to get him to give it another shot. Everything has been going great. The weather is good because of some hurricane so no complaints there. We're all going to play football right now as a zone. I love missionary work right now. It’s always hard at times but there's nowhere else I’d rather be. You learn so many things on a mission that you can't learn anywhere else. I know that this is the Lords work. It's not easy because it was never easy for him so why should it be easy for me. I can't complain I have no reason to. I love you all and thanks for everything.

Love, Elder Breinholt