Elder Teixeria

¡Hola!

This week was pretty amazing! Elder Teixeira of the First Quorum of the 70, came on a mission tour. He came to the Valencia Zone on Friday. It was such a wonderful experience! He is so great and the best part was including him, his wife, and the Hinckleys, there were only 22 of us in the room. So it was seemed very personal. He is very impressed with the work in the Valencia and challenged us to continue being an example to the mission. Elder Teixeira focused a lot on bringing people to church, especially families. He promised our zone specifically, that if we bring investigators to church, especially families, our mission will reach it´s goal of 404 baptisms for the year. That is a remarkable promise because we still need a little more than 100 baptisms to meet that goal. I would just like to point out that we´re not focused on numbers. As Elder Teixeira pointed out, the number itself isn´t important. Rather, each number symbolizes a person. Someone who is that much closer to returning to Heavenly Father. Yesterday we were expecting 18 investigators to come to church. Only 5 showed up. It was disappointing, but we just have to work extra hard this week to make sure they get there.

Tuesday evening we gave Isabel a blessing for health. She has been getting a lot of really bad headaches. She called to cancel our cita. But we showed up anyway and asked if she wanted a blessing. As a side note, earlier that day in the Bible she had been reading about healing of the sick. While we gave her the blessing, she could feel the Spirit. She didn´t admit it to us, but later told her daughter Joanna that she had felt the Spirit and no longer had problems with her (Joanna) getting baptized. Joanna is super excited and on Saturday while she was helping us and the other Elders prepare for a baptism for another girl, Maria Laura, she kept talking about ´"when she gets baptized." Hopefully tonight we can set a fecha (baptismal date).

I had a cool experience on Saturday too. Antonia is a 76 year old lady who is getting baptized this Saturday. She lives with a member family. The buzzers in their apartment building don´t work. Last week we travelled all the way out to their piso (far on the other side of town) and couldnt get in or get a hold of them. Saturday we had the same problem. Emeka (the member husband) wasn´t answering his phone. Thus, I said a super heartfelt prayer asking for a way to get in the building. I got a distinct feeling to wait 5 minutes. At first I doubted that it was from the Spirit. Come on how unoriginal is 5 minutes?! I thought it was just my mind. But being a missionary, I decided to be obedient to the prompting anyway. I didn´t tell Elder Lara about it and he was ready to leave. But after 3 of the minutes had passed I insisted that we wait 2 more minutes and try calling Emeka again. So we did. As he was trying to call Emeka, a lady left the building. I grabbed the door and we went in. When we got up to the piso and knocked on the door, Emeka answered and let us in and we got to teach Antonia.

Today all four of us went to the mall so that Elder Lara could get some suits tailored. Outside the mall there is this glass room set up with couch, toilet, sink, shower, etc. There are 2 people who live in it for 40 days straight. I don´t know if it´s for a reality tv show or what. But, there was a camera crew there. We stopped to watch for a second. The girl inside saw us an said, "who brought the guys in the suits?" (it´s set up so that there´s a mic so that you can hear wat´s said inside and they can hear outside) Naturally we started talking to her. She invited us in, but we didn´t have time. However the camera crew caught us. So i think i am on spanish tv! lol

¡Hasta luego!

Love,
Elder Buchkovich