Baptism

Hey family how is everything? Things are going good here in Dorrego. Yesterday we had the baptism of Daniela!! It was a bit of a miracle because at the beginning of the week she wasn´t going to get baptized. We had gone by here and she still had a few doubts about the law of chastity. We tried to help her solve her doubt and it just wasn´t seeming to really have effect so we had moved her baptismal date back to the 19th. Then we were talking to Elder Horton our district leader and he decided to come up to do the interview anyway so that Daniea could realize that she was ready and that she can keep all the commandments that the Lord asks us to keep. So on friday we have the interview with Daniela and Elder Horton. They were in the interview for about an hour talking and when they came out they both said that she was gonna get baptized on sunday! Elder Horton is an awesome Elder and really patient and loving. She had the fear basically that her boyfriend was going to leave her cause that´s what he had said. Apparently she was pretty attached to the guy but she decided at the end to do what the Lord wants her to do! It was an awesome experience and for some reason she hadn´t told us anything about that. I´m not really sure why cause we had felt like we´d done everything we could, but I guess sometimes you just need someone else to come in and say it and it has more of an effect. It was awesome though and she is doing really well. We also have some baptisms planned for the 26th of this month which will be great. They´re 2 kids of a less active member so we´re hoping that this will help to activate the entire family and get back strong. The kids names are Tobias and Franklin and they´re great. They have kind of a crazy story because both their parents are members, were sealed in the temple but then later got divorced and both of the parents sadly went inactive and the kids never got baptized. They´re really cool kids though and they could be the spark plug to activate the family again which would be awesome cause we need to activate some families here to help the ward get back to where it used to be. Elder Thomas and I are doing really well together but he´ll probably be leaving here on the 26th as well. He´s been here almost 6 months so it´s about his time to go. He´s great though and we´ve worked really well together. Oh I almost forgot, Jonathon got the Aaronic Priesthood this last week which was great! He´s progressing really well and has been really blessed since he´s been baptized. He´s awesome and my love for him grows more and more everyday. I´m glad you all got the packages! I hope you like them. We´re going into Bahía tonight so hopefully I´ll be getting the stuff you all sent me tomorrow when we go to district meeting. Thanks for all the love and support!! I´ll let you know all the details about the call on Christmas next week.

-Elder Nicholas Gaughan

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Hey everyone Happy Thanksgiving!! Glad you all enjoyed it. Turns out my companion and I had an almost american like thanksgiving lunch with a member on thursday so it all worked out. And I´m pretty good at keeping secrets huh? haha thanks mom. Now I can publicly say congratulations alex and tara!!! I´ve been telling all the members here how I´m gonna be an uncle so if you couldn´t tell I´m pretty excited as well. This week was pretty good. Maria, Sebastian and Daniela finally came to church yesterday which was awesome! It was so cool to see them there and they seemed to really like it as well. Daniela has a baptismal date for the this weekend so please pray for her so that she can get baptized this week. She´s a way cool girl and has been making a ton of changes in her life to be able to do this. Maria and Sebasitan are going pretty well too, a little slower but their going well. For Maria to get baptized she has to get divorced, her husband lives in Bahía but they don´t know where so that whole situation could get complicated. Even more with the fact that Maria has to go into the doctor every once in a while in Bahía. We´re gonna find a way to do it though and make it through everything. Jonathon is doing really well too. We´ve been getting to know him more and more every time we go over to teach new member lessons and he had a really tough past. I tell you all more about that on Christmas because it´s gonna take forever to type. This week was pretty good for the work too. We found a bunch of new investigators but had to end up dropping a few and a few others dropped us so that was kinda tough, but we did find this one lady named Nieves. Nieves is about 40 and has a bunch of kids. She´s evangelical but doesn´t really go to church and is having a bunch of problems in her life. We´ve been talking to her a lot about the Atonement and how it can help us with everything that goes on in our lives, especially the trials and difficulties that we are going through. It seemed to get to her and we´re hoping she gets better. She´s reading the Book of Mormon so that´s always a good sign. Besides that there´s not a whole lot of new stuff going on. We still keep finding crazy catholic people that tell us they don´t believe in God or aren´t interested in hearing about Him which is kind of a bummer but hey that´s their decision to take. We found some people with some crazy beliefs which was fun. We taught 2 of Sebastian´s friends this week, one was Guillermo who believed in God but not in Christ cause he saw something on the discovery channel. And his other friend Ian who believed in the Matrix. Those were some interesting lessons to say the least but I had a good time. It´s cool to see that even in little tiny towns, Argentina is never boring. Love you all and I´m gonna be sending off a Christmas package pretty soon!
-Elder Nicholas Gaughan