it was cute ...

Dear family,

I didn’t get transferred this week. The funny thing though is that I’m still in a threesome, or at least I will be. Elder Sharp is being moved to an English ward (he almost went home when they told him that—no joke) and we are getting a new elder here in La Habra. Elder Fraga will be staying here as well. Anyway, I guess they have a flu in the MTC so new elders are being held back for two weeks. That means one of the English elders in Fullerton that is going to be training doesn’t have a companion for two weeks so the elder replacing elder Sharp is going with him (Elder Zelnick) and then will come and be with us when the new elders get here. So not much has changed for me.

This past week has been pretty good. On Saturday our investigator Michelle held a party for her son and her brother who had birthdays this month so we went and had food and talked to our investigators etc. I even got to help with the piñata by moving it up and down while the kids tried to hit it. The piñata was Mario—it was cute. We had four investigators at church so that was a good thing. Juaquin finally came so we are going to baptize him this Sunday. Michelle decided she wants to start coming to church so we were really happy when she walked in.

Our ward mission leader moved! So now I’m the only one in the ward that can play the piano…which means I sight read lots of hymns on Sunday for sacrament as well as elder Keeler/Gillespie’s baptism. It was pretty intense, but I did all right.

Hopefully someone gets called as the new ward mission leader soon. I thought that’s pretty cool that Ross gets to do that job [ward mission leader]. I have no idea how things work over there, but here the mission leader does a lot to help us. We meet with him every week and talk about our investigators and their needs and then he talks to the ward leaders about it. That’s going to stop this transfer though. I guess they’re trying to cut back on how many meetings we have. He also helps arrange the baptisms by printing out the programs, directing the meeting, etc. It’s really nice to have someone like that in the ward helping us out that knows everything we are working with and is a member of the ward. One thing that he was supposed to do that he didn’t was to assign people to feed us every week so we can eat with less actives, recent converts, investigators etc. and so we don’t eat with the same people every week, but that’s okay. They just pass a calendar around every week and people sign up.

We started teaching some new investigators this week so hopefully things work out with them. I’m hoping we have lots of baptisms this transfer of people we’ve been working with that are getting close. I’d really like to see Julia get baptized before I get moved. Hopefully our baptism works out this weekend and we’ll already have met the mission goal for this year of one baptism per companionship per transfer. The mission as a whole finally met that goal this last transfer with 67 baptisms. I think there are less than 60 companionships. Anyway, the work is moving forward and I know great things are in the future. Keep praying for us and the missionaries around you. This is a great work and it can not be stopped. Love you all, have a great week.

Elder Curtis