This week flew by like it was nothing… The days are long but the weeks are very, very short. It’s hard to believe that I am even writing again.

This past week was ZONE CONFERENCE!!! I really love zone conference… its one of the only times in our mission that we stop teaching and have an opportunity to learn. It’s really awesome to hear from our mission president and the assistants because our mission is so big, that its one of the only times that we get to see them.
This time the focus (although it is always on baptisms) was primarily on how to help people get to the chapel and to make sure that they enjoy themselves and feel the spirit when they get there… They taught us many tricks of the trade, helpful hints and a ton of clues to put power behind our commitments to attend church. The goal is 300 investigators in the chapel every week (for the whole mission) and that means 4 investigators attending church for each area.

We really felt that this zone conference was meant for us, because with the baptism of Jorge Alvarenga, we do not have any progressing investigators that have attended the chapel, so that has been our focus as well, and as a result, many people had promised us that they would attend church this Sunday.
Lamentably, no one who had promised us came, but I guess it’s a process and not an immediate thing… We are going to continue working at it, and hopefully we will have more success this Sunday.
We did have a really awesome contacting experience… We were contacting an apartment building and we were talking with a woman named Gladys and the contact was awesome, and we taught the first discussion and then we were about to give her a Book of Mormon, but I only had one, and we felt, that despite it all, we should not give her a Book of Mormon just yet, and we gave her a pamphlet about it instead.

Then, after we continued tracting, and we went to a house, and a woman, named Celina, answered and let us in very quickly (shouting at her aged mother who was watching the partido, that the chicas were from the “church” and wanted to talk about God.) So she lets us in and we begin to teach her and its like the golden contact that you only read in the Ensign… She is totally committed and attentive in the whole lesson and when we teach her about Joseph Smith, she totally relates to his confusion about religion, you would think that she was Joseph Smith´s best friend, and when we relate the first vision, she gasps in amazement. I have never EVER had anyone gasp in amazement (vocally at least) during the first vision. She totally accepts our baptismal challenge, and we are so exited to teach her again.

Now that I am thinking about it, I remember that I felt very much guided by the Spirit, like we were a car and that someone else was driving… the spirit was so strong, and the lesson went so well, we could not deny that it was one of our best lessons ever. And then we realized that the Book of Mormon we had was not meant for Gladys, but for Celina, and the spirit was guiding us long before we even started the lesson.

Its pretty awesome how the spirit works in mysterious ways, but it always turns out better in the end.
-Hermana Tritsch