Elder Ballard came to visit

Hello family!

Wow I cant believe it is Monday again, I feel like I just wrote you
yesterday. I hope you all had a great week. From your emails it sounds
like it was fun! I am jealous you all partied in AZ without me! Thanks
for all of the pics. I love each one so much!

Well, this week was good. We have been contacting up a storm this week
which has been fun and exhausting but hopefully several of the
references we received will meet with us this coming week and we can
start teaching more people. But, like I said last week, the few people
we are teaching are wonderful! I wanna talk about Carlos because holy
cow he is just incredible and so so prepared and ready to be baptized
this saturday! We meet with him every single day and it is always the
highlight of my day. It really is a testimony to me of the power of
the spirit because I cant understand him whatsoever but the spirit is
so so strong in our lessons that I can just feel the spirit testify to
me what he is saying is true and that he really does have a super
strong testimony of this gospel. He gets money from people who walk by
and he has been saving 10% of it for the past 2 weeks so that once he
is baptized he can pay his tithing. Also, so he had the baptismal
interview lesson with him the other day in preparation for his
interview yesterday with the DL and we were talking about the word of
wisdom and what not and Hma Caballero and her old comp had obviously
already taught him this principle awhile ago but apparently it didnt
quite click in his head because the day after our lesson about the
interview he said he had started fasting right after we left and was
going to end his fast later that night to help him have the strength
and ability to quite smoking. This shocked us for several reasons.
First, we had no clue he smoked. He never smelt like smoke and they
taught him the word of wisdom and he said he understood it and would
live it etc. But the coolest thing is that he had a testimony of
fasting and fasted on his own for help. He told us that since that
fast he threw out all of his cigarettes and has not had a desire to
smoke since. Pretty darm amazing. I know that the power from fasting
and praying is so so real. We also took him to the temple and did a
temple tour this week and it was so wonderful. I finally can send pisc
so I will send a pic of him in front of the temple.

Fernando is great but is beign stubborn and has a lot of fear that we
are trying to help him with. We keep inviting him to pray to know if
what we are teaching him is true, along with other commitments as
well, and we keep goign back and finding out that he fulfilled the
committed to read etc but he has yet to pray to find out if what we
are teaching is true. He loves coming to church. loves the Book Of
Mormon, has been to 2 baptisms and loves them but refuses to pray
because he says he is scared for the answer (he obviously knows what
the answer will be). When he was in the States for surgrey and
recovery for 5 years and was all by himself he said the only thing
that never failed him was his church. And so he is says he is too
loyal to be able to change churches. We taught him that the important
thing is to be loyal to God and Jesus Christ, not necessarily the
church itself. Anyways, its been challenging with him and after much
prayer, we both feel that if this week he still wont commit to pray
then its probably not his time.

We have had several other lesson 0 this week and several of them have
failed us which is always to sad. They always tell us "... I´m
sorry..." and we think to oursleves, no we are the ones that are sorry
because we know that this is their salvation.

Hermana Caballero is still as great as ever. I honestly dont know how
I got so blessed to be able to learn from her and be her companion.

Well, that is it for this week.

Ohhhh my gosh, how the heck did I forget.....

ELDER BALLARD came here on saturday and at the very last second we got
a text saying that he rearranged his schedule to be able to meet with
the missionaries for 1 hour the following day! We were all so stoked!
We were able to shake his hand and the whole hour was just amazing. He
spoke about DyC 11 and said "your desire is directly proportional to
your success". he also gave us the advice to carry around a small
picture of Christ with us and whenever we are feeling down or
discouraged or just need help to just take a second a look at the
picture and remember what happened in the Gardin of Getsemani. Way
cool huh? So, today Hermana Caba and I are going to the church book
store to get a nice, small pic of the Savior to keep with us always.
Anyways, this devotional was wonderful and was jsut what I needed.

I hope you all have a wonderful week. Thank you for your love and
support and prayers. I need them and I feel them.:)

I LOVE YOU!

Love, Hermana Heims