Week 79!

hey there!!!

it was great to hear from all of you guys this week!!!  this week has been pretty good overall, i decided to do divisions on tuesday with one of the Elders in my District named Elder Fonseca.  he's a total stud!  he's got one more change than i do and he's from Panamà.  he was actually in my first zone in Paysandù and he was there the whole time i was there.  back then we were good friends and i didn't understabd him 50% of the time but now that i can actually comunicate with him it's been super fun to have him in this district.  while i was with him he had a girl that they had been trying to get baptized that next saturday as a lession with me.  at the beginning she said that she wasn't ready to get baptized and everything... it was super annoying, but i started to talk to her calmly and stuff like that and she finally told us WHY she didn't want to get baptized this week..... WOMEN PROBLEMS....  i was like OK we are not going to ask anymore questions and i don't want to hear anything more!!!  but she DID accept a fecha for this next week!  she knows that everything is true and wants to get baptized so we'll see that happen!!!  this saturday was super cool because there was a ward activity that the bishopric set up.  in our ward there are like 140 màs o menos people who go to church every week and on the records of the church... 824 people!!!!  so what the bishop had the ward do was go out to every street with a few names trying to figure out if they've moved, died, or still live there.  and to see who really has intress in the church and having members coming to visit them.  we only cantacted about 200 people, but these people, some of them haven't had people pass by them in 26 years of being member.  it was super cool.  on sunday the bishop asked for a few testimonies of the people who did the activity.  the bishop asked a guy named Josè Prestes who is the dad of Leonardo who i baptized and he has slowly ben reactivating.  WOW i came so close to crying with his testimony, he talked about how for 27 years he had been baptized and for 26.8 years he had been inactive and how going to visit these hermanos he could feel the spirit and he could feel how useless he had been living (spiritually speaking) and how he knows that he will NEVER slack in the gospel again.  it was a super powerful testimony!!!  that same day he was called to be a Young Men's counciler.  he has changed 100% from the way he was when i began visiting the family.  he is going to be a force to be reconned with in the gospel!!!  this 3 hour changed his life and the lives of quite a few others.  i love you all and next week we are going to have P Day on a wednesday because next week is the Patria Gaucha which is the biggest gaicho fiesta in all of Uruguay!!!  i'll let you all know how it is!!!
love ya,
Elder Atkinson