Week 72--Hinog na o hindi pa ?

Hello everyone!! Another week down here in Batac City :) I'm loving it here. I love being with Elder Hall and our work is going really well. I think that this time in my mission has been just the absolute most happy, most fulfilling time for me so far. It's great.

The work is on fire. We had 18 people we're teaching come to church this week. Me and Elder Hall were pretty surprised last Sunday, people just kept showing up to church! We were waiting outside for people and then went inside, about 5-10 minutes after it started lots more showed up and me and Hall kept making eye contact from across the hall and mouthing the word "Brooo" to each other. Even people that we had dropped decided to come to church this week. I was so happy to see an inactive family come back as well that we met a couple weeks ago. Life is good. The work is great and true.

We also had a baptism on Saturday! That was fun. We worked all day and showed up at 5:45 a little early to get things set up. The ward had assured us earlier that day that the water in the font was taken care of.. We got there and there was nothing. So we spent the next hour and a half frantically running back and forth from a house down the street which had a water pump. We carried these five gallon buckets and got drenched in the process. Wet from the water AND from the sweat - it was exhausting. I told Elder Hall I felt like we were in sports conditioning or something haha.

This week we stopped by an investigator of ours to try and teach. He told us that he was busy but he gave us a papaya which was nice. The papaya wasn't ripe quite yet, but he assured us that it would be in a couple days. This story kinda shows something that I've learned in my mission, especially in this area. Sometimes the people that we talk to aren't quite ready to accept the message. (often) I've learned that instead of trying to teach and convince one of these people, it's better to find and teach those who are ready to receive us and the message. Just like it's better to wait until the papaya is ripe :)

hinog na o hindi pa ? --> Is it ripe yet or not? This is the question that Elder Hall and I constantly ask while we are teaching people. We are focusing our efforts on the ripe papayas, and we're seeing good things happen from it :)

Well I have to apologize once again for my weakness in taking lots of pictures. To be fair my camera was dead for almost the whole week and I couldn't find my charger. Here's the picture I did take though!

9/21/2019

Baptism!! Really awesome. I kinda look like a zombie because of the hour and a half of conditioning we had to do. haha.

Well that's my week! It's really good. Life is so great. I love this work and I love my mission :)

Have a great week you all!!

Elder Childers