Yesterday morning at 9 o'clock we got a call from our branch president saying that one of the speakers wasn't going to be able to make it to church. He needed us to fill up 15 minutes of sacrament meeting. Our personal study time was already over and we had to drive to church about 5 minutes after the phone call was over. When we got to church at 9:30 we had to practice with the choir for the musical number we would be singing that day. Sacrament meeting started and the other speaker was a 12-year-old girl, so of course that didn't last long. I didn't look at the clock until after I had finished speaking but there was 25 minutes that we needed to speak, with little to no preparation time. Luckily, Elder Bennett had asked me to prepare a talk for district meeting in a week or so, and that morning I had started to prepare for that. I had like 4 lines written down and a handful of scripture references and that's what I had for the sacrament meeting talk. So I got up and spake...for 15 minutes! That's the most I've ever spoke before and that's the least prepared I've ever been to speak. I thought that was pretty crazy. There was definitely some divine intervention in there.
This week has been pretty, well, desolate. It felt like a month. We had 1 new investigator, and 30 finding hours(which, for all intents and purposes, is way too much). We haven't been any less diligent or committed. It seems like we just ran into a wall. 30 finding hours means we had about 10 hours that we should have been teaching lessons but we weren't able to. We are scraping at the bottom of the barrel. But I'm sure that things will start to look up soon, as they always do.
We talked to Raquel this week, the Nicaraguan lady whose husband doesn't really want her to get baptized. She wants to go to church so bad. I think that we will be able to get her there soon enough. Her enthusiasm is inspirational. It makes me feel as if I don't appreciate church as much as I should. I think we all should appreciate it a little more. Sacrament is supposed to be the most important hour of the week. Leah is still doing well, but she needs to go to church very badly and she isn't as enthusiastic about it because of bad experiences she's had in the past. In other words, gossip. I hope that gossip isn't as bad in our congregations as it must have been in hers, but I think that if we are not careful with our words we might create an environment that is not good for people that are investigating the church. And that would be a very bad thing. Anyway, I hope everything is going well in the states. It's cooled down a bit over here but it's not horrible. Yet.
--Elder Wade
