Easter

Hello Everybody,

This week was very interesting for us. We did have a great Easter. We spent some time with a less active and his family. He wanted us to share an Easter message to his granddaughter. We shared the #Hallelujah video the church put out. We have been using that a lot in our proselyting. After that we had dinner at the Hollingsworths, the senior couple that work in the mission office. Another senior missionary and a recent convert joined us as well. We got loaded up on candy and cake.

Wednesday we had a huge blizzard that grounded all the cars. We didn't do any driving that day and we had to walk to dinner. The restaurant we wanted to go to was closed due to the snow and the only place that was open was an Indian Restaurant. I didn't enjoy it but it was still dinner. We were supposed to have zone meeting on Wednesday but we cancelled that because we couldn't drive our cars. But we will have one this Wednesday.  Now the snow is almost gone. It is in the 70's right now I think. Elder Conlin and I played tennis this morning. 

Stella's baptism fell through unfortunately. She was supposed to be baptized on March 26th and confirmed on the 27th. We had our last lesson on Friday night, March 25th, and she confessed that she still struggles with green tea. So we called President Mendenhall and he said that she would have to make a commitment to us to stop drinking tea if she is going to be baptized the next day. When we told her we did our best to do it in the nicest way possible but she went off on us and started cussing us out. We spent around 30 minutes at the door step late at night.

She wouldn't make the full commitment when we invited her to. We asked her "Will you commit to stop tonight" and she kept saying "I'll try" and "I already told you". She was just not ready. She also said she would not be baptized the next day and that she doesn't understand why she can't be baptized even though she drinks green tea once or twice a day. The next morning she would not answer the door, calls, or text. It truly broke our hearts. Now we feel we need to give her some space but we will keep her in our prayers and try again in a couple of weeks. 

We have been losing our investigators one by one, but one showed up to church with his less active mom yesterday. That was Ricky, he said that he is kinda scared to get baptized, probably because he doesn't know what to expect, and we didn't know that before. So we are teaching him tonight and we will see if he will come around. This week we have MLC again on Friday and that should be fun. Can't wait to see all the movies I miss out on after the mission. Hard to believe I hit 18 months in a couple of days. I hope everything is going well!

Love,

Elder Rodriguez