Hola!! This week was a pretty awesome week. But I'm not sure why to be honest, haha. We didn't have a ton of stuff, but we were pretty busy. We didn't do much I don't think that merits a huge exclamation point...but it was just a good, solid week :). To start off, we have an investigator with a baptismal date now! :) Her name is Ana and she's from the Dominican Republic and she is incredible. She's a contact that I did on the bus a few weeks ago right before the transfer ended and we've been meeting with her regularly, and this past week we extended the invitation and she accepted!! It was a great visit and we had our recent converts, Maria and Jorge, there to help us out and their testimonies were incredible. I'm so stoked, haha. The only problem for me is...her baptism date is the 20th and I don't think I'll be here :(. Same with this other investigator who is finally getting married and won't be baptized until September. I think I'm getting transferred since I've been here now about five months, which is about average for a missionary here. But we'll see. I still got two weeks so I'm not going to jump ahead, haha.
We're still working on Elder Carroll's residency here. For some reason we've just encountered little problem after little problem and it's been so annoying. We went to Barcelona Thursday to stay the night because we were going to go do the residency stuff in Barcelona instead of Mataró early Friday. But it turns out we didn't need to do anything so we fixed up some stuff in the office and then just came back, haha. It was a fun little trip though. So we came back today, this morning, to do it all and they said that we have to come back next Monday because all his papers are still in Madrid and it's a holiday in Madrid, tomorrow and Wednesday are holidays here, and then that just leaves Thursday and Friday. What a mess, haha. But sooner or later we'll get this done...hopefully.
We had a good solid week though, like I said earlier. We had a ton of visits set up and quite a few actually happened. And like always quite a few didn't, haha. Saturday we had a loaded day and we were actually going to have to do splits to cover everything. We had two members set up to come with us and things were looking great, but then one by one our visits starting falling through. And then one of our members fell through so the split wasn't going to happen. So instead of having like seven visits that day, we had one, hahaha. Man that was crazy. But instead of getting discouraged we just kept going and actually stayed upbeat and happy which is so key to this work. I hate it when a companion, or myself, gets discouraged because it's just so much harder to work. But things are really starting to pick up here. Our number of visits is starting to increase, we're finding more people to teach, I have a good companion who wants to work, and it's just a good time of the year! haha. The temperature has cooperated too so that helps a bit :) This week it’s rained pretty hard a few times which helps with the temperature but it's still nice and sunny and warm. Good ol July. Can't wait for August haha.
I love you all! Know that I pray and think about you all (not too often of course ;)) and that I absolutely love this work. There is no greater work and no greater cause than furthering the kingdom of God on the earth. Until next week!
Elder Mathews
