Playing Catch-up! June 7th-28th

Don't worry, Nick has back-up!

Ana's baptism

Cleaning up the Bishop's house after the storm

Sorry its been awhile since I've posted any of Nick's letters. My Mom and I went on a trip to Paris and Rome, so I'm playing catch-up with Nick's letters. He has been hard at work, and is past the 7 month mark! He is having a little trouble with head-aches and stress, so any prayers you could send his way would be such a help! Thank you all for your love and support.

June 7th-

Well this week has been pretty good. The storm from last week absolutely destroyed a colony where my bishop lives, so on Tuesday our whole zone went and helped with the clean up. I feel bad for him, his family is living in the church right now unitl they can get there house cleaned up. The water went above my head in the storm, i´ll send you a picture of where the water mark is. So im working with a family right now named the Cruz family. They´re pretty awesome. they´re real young with two young daughters. We taught them one time but it was a real powerful lesson, and when we came back the first thing she said to me was, " so i prayed like you asked me too, and i don´t know if was just because i was thinking to myself i was going to feel this way before i prayed, but after i felt super super calm and peaceful.. what do you think that means".. so yeah it was awesome haha one of the more spiritual lessons i´ve had on my mission, it wasn´t a huge deal or anything but for some reason i was way moved. So hopefully they continue to progress and we can baptize them sometime in the near future!
Things are going fine with my companion, we don´t have much in common, but he´s nice and humble so it´s cool.

June 14th-

Well everthing is going pretty well here! Im going to be baptizing a women named Ana on Saturday!! Im not sure if i have already told you about her but she is 45, doesn´t have any family and just works for and lives with a different family. I found her about 3 weeks ago and told me that she was really lonely and sad. We started teaching her and as we kept coming back she said, "ever since you guys have been coming over I have just been so much more happy, and I know that you guys are sent from God because I can feel the difference from when you come and when you leave." She has also said, " I have had a lot of religions come to my house and none of them have been like yours, not even close! I know its true." So that was really cool. She kind of had a fear of baptism and first because she thought that you had to be absolutely perfect after your baptism and thought that she would be in trouble if she wasn´t able to go to church one Sunday or something, but we explained to her that isn´t the case at all. It was pretty cool we gave her a little object lesson with a bottle of water, cool aid, and bleach. We took the bottle of water and said this is what you are like when you are born, perfectly clean. When you get older you start to sin, gradually dirtying your soul (that sounds weird.. sounded better in spanish i promise haha) so then we would poor a little cool aid in until it was way red and asked do you a think a soul like this can live in the presence of God? We then said the bleach was baptism with authority through the atonement. We poured it in and the red magically went back to clear. She loved it! That´s when she accepted her baptism.
Well this Thursday President is doing "surprise interviews" in the actually houses of all the Elders... luckily my boy Aiono hooked me up with the info haha so we´ll be ready.. house spotless!

June 22nd

how´s it goin guys? Well I´m glad to hear Mom and Brooke made it back safe and sound. Sounds like an amazing trip that you´ll never forget. Those pictures are amazing! Maybe one day i´ll get to go there.. but as for now im content with my Salvadoreño homies haha. Well my week has been pretty good, a little stressful, but good. First off, I baptized Ana Matilde Sandoval Hernandez on Thursday. It was awesome! She was way happy and way excited to have friends in the church and to get going with all the relief society stuff haha funny huh. It´s funny that you guys were all worried Saturday, because it realy was one of the most stressful days of my mission. To make a long sotry short, we went to go visit ana to make sure she was going to go to church to be confirmed the next day, because as you know without the confirmation it means absolutely nothing. When we went there, the owner of the house said that she had quit working there all of the sudden, and went to visit her family in a place far away. Our phone isn´t working in our house right now, so i couldn´t call her or anything. So we ran out around literally for 2 and a half hours trying to find somebody to let us use their phone. All of the members we went to weren´t home or didn´t have minutes on their cells. We finally found one and when i called her, her cell phone was turned off!! I was freakin out. So I just left a lengthy message on her answering machine telling her how important it was that she was there on Sunday (i had already told her about 100 times), and just hoped for the best. Well we showed up on Sunday and she was already there ready to be confirmed looking at us like.. "do you really think i wouldn´t show up?" haha. So that was a relief.

Well as you guys already know we had a multi zone conference yesterday and Elder Clark (area 70 president of Central America) was there to speak. It was sooooo sweet! Powerful guy. Really funny too. He was crackin jokes the whole time and often the jokes were directed toward President Perez and his wife haha so of course all us missionaries loved that. He served his mission in Argentina so he talked for a total of 3 hours or so completely in spanish, and the man is around 60 years old so it was pretty impressive! We received a ton of good instruction. And I dont want to say the highlight of the meeting.. ok i´ll be honest it was definitely the highlight of the meeting, was getting the package you guys sent me!!! Soooo awesome. Thank you so much i loved every little thing that was in it. It was amazing to see your guys faces and all of the family. I loved all the videos from the family home evening with all of the Reids it was sooo good to see everyone! I enjoy listening to Nichole haha it was awesome that i could understand someone actually from my family speaking spanish. But yeah it made me super excited to talk with Dad and all of my buddies in spanish when i get home it´s gonna be sweet. Josh is looking way way old and Adam and Justin look older as well. Tell Grandma (both sides) thanks so much for the letters and money i really enjoyed their letters and that im glad they are feeling better. Tell the rest of the family thanks so much for the letters it was soo good to get them it´s comforting to know how many people support me.