Arizona Mesa Mission : Baptism

This is Sister Anderson's post of Sept 6. We got busy with the Arts Festival and other things and then the internet went down for 3 days. I will probably be posting again today or tomorrow. MOM

Dear MOM and DAD,

Well most of this last week I've had a nasty head/chest cold but it has been a pretty good week otherwise.

The MOST exciting news of the week was Alex's baptism. It was such a neat day and I even felt mostly okay for the morning during the service. He had so much support there, there were three different wards represented. Sister Dyer and I have been to several baptisms that she had helped teach, but it was really cool to see his progression and be involved in his conversion. The next day he received the holy ghost and it was really good! Satan has been working on him so hard, the day before his baptism he got kicked out of his halfway house (conflict of interest) and he told us later that the police had found his missing aunt's body the morning he received the holy ghost. We had a lesson with him the next day and you could just see the light of Christ in his eyes, he really has changed so much and he can see how it has benefited his life. He had gone to his dad's house on Sunday night (in the "slums") and said he was so grateful that he wasn't at that place in his life anymore.

Christina is such an interesting puzzle, she is changing but not.... it's really weird, but she actually may be moving to Denver because they are struggling financially so we may not get to teach her anymore. Which is really sad because just the beginning of this week she had set a baptismal date.

We have 4 investigators and all 4 have baptismal dates in September. Alex of course got baptized on the 3rd and Evan's is still the 17th, but now so is Christina's (if she stays) and Nicci's. That's 3 baptisms on the same day!!!!! Nicci is a 9 year old that just hasn't been baptized yet ("unbaptized member"). We've been working on her mother for a few weeks so it was really exciting when she called us and asked us to teach Nicci the lessons.

So as I mentioned before I've been sick for a few days, it started off as just a chest cold but progressed pretty fast to my head. Sister White (the visitors' center Director's wife) took me to their house during one of our VC shifts and let me sleep on their couch. It was such a blessing (we had a ton of appointments that evening that we couldn't miss). I'm almost positive that my mission experience is nothing like the norm because of the Visitors' Center.

As you can see in one of my pictures I got my hair cut, it really needed it and now it doesn't take me as long to fix. The Other two are from Alex's baptism; Me, Alex, and Sister Dyer and Me and Emma Birch, she's like a littler sister and she's such a doll.

A kid came into the VC the other day needing tweezers... he was from Germany with his exchange family checking out the temple. He had never seen a cactus so he decided to touch one... yeah he knows now to never touch a cactus. It was really funny, I felt bad for him though. He spoke 4 languages and when he goes home I bet he'll convert. The mom and I talked for a bit about introducing him to the church and she said he really like it (the government won't let them convert on exchange programs). 2 Nephi 5:27

Miss you much, Love you more!!!

Love Sister Anderson