Elder Ritter - 8/7/2023

Hola a todos! 

Sorry this week's email will be two! This one's from last week

This week was pretty crazy, and I'm already quite tired from a fun P-Day, but I saw some incredible things happen this week that were sooo awesome! 

To start, we found a TON of people this week with an exchange with the Zone Leaders and it was super awesome. Me and Elder Clive just decided to hit the streets and try and find as many people as we could, shopping and chatting with everybody. It was really fun, and we got a ton of people's numbers, with a lot of them promising to read the Book of Mormon. It was great!

We also had two friends come to church, and our recent convert John with his non-member wife come when we thought they wouldn't. Our two friends, Flavia and Carlos, came to a smaller meeting at 8 in the afternoon, and had a great experience, and we gave them a tour afterwards of the chapel and of the temple. Flavia especially seemed really interested, and when we showed her the baptismal font she said, "oh yeah, I've always wanted to get baptized into a church, I feel like it's something I need to do." I jokingly (inside not very jokingly) said, "well, hey, we got a font right here! Maybe you'll be baptized here!" She laughed and said, "yeah, maybe!"

Internally I was giggling with joy about that.

Another cool thing I got to do this week was as a district leader, I get to do baptismal interviews for the missionaries in my district and their friends who are going to get baptized. I had the great opportunity to do TWO this week. Both were a little nerve-wracking since it was my first time, but they both went fantastic. One of them I had to miss my lunch, hop on a metro for 45 minutes, get to their church in the heat (it is very much the middle of summer here) do the interview, make sure the form was filled out, grab 1-2 tiny snack sandwiches that they miraculously had prepared for the baptism, and hurry back another 45 minutes in time for a videocall meeting. But it was so worth it. Hearing these people bear their simple testimonies is really the beat thing ever. Remember, your testimony doesn't have to be long! It just needs to be sincere. 

Quick funny story before I go, I had to give a short workshop in our district council on Friday about how we can overcome setbacks and silly mistakes with laughter, instead of beating ourselves up for it. It was a fun little exercise and we told each other funny stories from our mission and had a good laugh about them. But literally the next day, we had an opportunity to use it! There was a baptism in our ward forth bishop's kid, and it was the sister missionaries' job to fill the font. Well they didn't realize how fast it would fill, so they turned it on and left to eat breakfast before coming back. The baptism starts, and my companion goes out to use the bathroom, and he notices that the font is completely full. He naturally gets worried and grabs me, and in the amount of time it took for him to grab me, the water had started pooling out into the hallway from the men's bathroom! We quickly grabbed the keys, ran into the very much flooded bathroom, turned off the water, and started mopping it up so that the baptism service wouldn't be ruined. We videocalled the hermanas and told them the situation and they were completely shocked. They ran down to the church and helped us out by bringing towels and stuff to dry the floors. We were working pretty quickly, and we dried the floors right as people started exiting the chapel to do the baptismal ordinance. We all breathed a heavy sigh of relief, and had a good laugh about it.

Overall, it was a good week! I can't wait to see what kind of progress this ward sees in the future and what we'll do. Vamossssss!

¡Cristo vive! ¡El Libro de Mormón es verdadero!

¡Os amo!

Elder Ritter 

Fotos:

Elder Clive munching on his purrito (pizza burrito) 

Cathedral we went to as a zone on Monday

Some views from the top of the dome!