Miracles

Yes as you can all see this week was a miraculous week. It all started out on monday when all of our plans fell through so we went out to knock doors. We knocked, and knocked and knocked and didn´t find anyone. Then we knocked a house where people were eating so we had about zero chance of getting in, but we talked to the lady who answered the door and she called her son in law who lives behind them. He came out and let us in and we had an interesting lesson with them. Him, his wife and their friend make up the band of an evangelical church. Let´s just say it was interesting. Then the rest of the week we were getting ready for Claudio´s baptism and zone conference all in the same week which was a little out of hand but we managed to handle it somehow. Oh tueday was a pretty random day as well. We went by Claudio to go over the questions to the baptismal interview and as we were doing that we ran into a friend of his named Adrian. Adrian practices something called Reike which I don´t know if you all have heard of it or not. From what he explained and I understood Reike is kind of a mixture of Christianity and Buddism, kind of. It´s complicated let´s just say that. Anyway we talked to him and had a really cool lesson. We gave him a Book of Mormon and hopefully we can teach him again cause he had some really interesting ideas to say the least. Ok now we´re gonna skip ahead to thursday cause that´s when things really started to get interesting. Thursday we had the baptismal interview with Claudio. We live with our District Leader, Elder Decilia, who´s a really cool guy from Salta. Elder Decilia and my comp, Elder Murillo go to do the interview with Claudio and I go with Decilia´s companion, Elder Wartena to do some service and work in their area. Some really random, weird stuff happened with the interview and it got rescheduled like 3 times in the same day. Elder Wartena and I went to go to service for their branch mission leader. Their branch mission leader is about to have an operation to recieve a kidney from his son cause he doesn´t have any. He´s been on dialisys for 8 years and he´s finally gonna have this operation. And in order to have this operation the house needed to be in conditions for his and his son´s recuperation. So they called us to paint. We had a good time and when we get back they still hadn´t done the interview with Claudio so we take off to go work in Decilia and Wartena´s area. We´re working out there and I was pretty sure that they had to be done with the interview by that time. Me being the impatient person that I am called my comp to see what had happened with the interview. When I call Decilia answers me and tells me that he´ll tell me about it in the house. That right there made me nervous cause if he had passed he would have told me right then. So there I am biting my fingernails the rest of the night worried about this interview. We get back to the house and apparently Claudio had stolen before, was caught by the police, but they didn´t throw him in jail. They put him on some form of probation and said that if they saw him doing anything in the next 18 months they´d toss him in jail then. So we called President to see what he had to say, if he had to come interview Claudio or what the deal was exactly. Decilia explained him the situation and President said that it was ok, Claudio could get baptized!! We were super happy at this point. Shortly after that 8 Elderes arrived at our house to spend the night for zone conference the next day (friday). On thursday night I went to sleep fine and friday morning woke up pretty miserably sick, and the fun part was that I had to direct zone conference the next day. I survived the day and was able to learn some pretty awesome stuff at the same time. Then saturday we had the baptism of Claudio. We had service in the morning with the District President which went pretty well then in the afternoon we went to the church to start filling up the font. We start the font and shortly thereafter recieve a text messsage from Claudio saying that he wasn´t compeltely sure about getting baptized and he didn´t think he was gonna get baptized that day. This struck us as super weird cause he was doing great the other day. We ran home, changed and took off for the house of Claudio. We get there but he couldn´t talk to us at that time. We started freaking out a little more at this point. We told his brother that we were gonna come back in about half an hour to talk to Claudio. We head back to the church to see how the font was doing. We check the font and after that I go into the sacrament meeting room, fall to my knees and start praying like crazy. After praying for a while I get up and see Elder Murillo behind me also praying. He finishes and we head out for Claudio´s house yet again. We find him, talk to him a bit and he was already calmer and got baptized a few hours later!!!!! It was in every sense of the word a miracle! Truely an amazing experience for me and that night we fell to our knees thanking the Lord for everything he had done. So that was my week. Fairly normal.....well somewhat. Hey am I an uncle yet? I love you all, thanks for everything!!!!

-Elder Nicholas Gaughan
Pictures
1. Zone Conference
2. Elder Murillo and Claudio
3. Elder Murillo, Mariana (Claudio´s girlfriend), Claudio and Me
PS I don´t know why Argentines don´t smile in pictures, they just don´t