Mineral Wells Week 7 April 24, 2017 Week Ninety-three

Hey y'all!

I don't even know where to start this week. We have worked SO hard, and we've been blessed even more than we deserve. When last I wrote, we were ecstatic that we had set a Baptism date with another person, which put us at a total of two people with a Baptism date. However, this week we set THREE more, bringing us to a total of five people with a baptismal date! I'll go in order of the dates that we set.

The first story starts on last Monday morning. Elder Rowley and I were doing our laundry in the laundry room for our amazement complex. There's six washing machines and six dryers in there, but normally only three of the washing machines are actually in working order. However, when we walked in last week, only two of them were working. We took the only two available ones and then hoped that nobody would come in while we were doing laundry, as it would be super awkward to tell them that these two teenage guys were using all of the washers. Wouldn't you know, somebody came in. She asked us which machines were open, and we sheepishly answered that we were using all of the ones that worked. She figured she would just wait until we were done, so we made small talk for a few minutes....which turned into a conversation lasting over an hour where we taught the entire first lesson, gave her a Book of Mormon, and pamphlet for each of our first two lessons. The woman's name was Heather, and she had just moved into town just three days before to distance herself from a bad situation. She told us that she had "...been baptized before, but [she felt] like [she] had screwed up so much since then that [she needs] to be baptized again." We felt that there was a golden opportunity to be taken, and so when we went over to her apartment on Friday to teach her, we set a Baptism date with her for June 3rd! The best part was that when we came back to Fu our laundry this morning, there were three washers running again. It was so cool to see how God had helped us find her by doing something as simple as making a washing machine stop working for a week.

The next Baptism date we actually set that same day! We went over to the home of a less-active member of our church who had been baptized five years ago, and while there we taught her and her son. Her son is a friendly enough guy, he didn't seem all that interested any of the other times we went over. This time, however, as we taught the lesson, we saw that as she spoke about Baptism, one of the major topics of that lesson, that he was pricked in his heart (to use scriptural language). We felt prompted to invite him to be baptized on July 15, and he said yes! We set it a little further out just because Chris has a few obstacles he's got to need to tackle first, but we're excited to work with him to overcome them.

The next person is another exciting story! We were teaching one of our less active members a few weeks ago, and we asked her if she knew anybody who we could teach. She referred is to a friend of hers named Ezell. We reached out to Ezell and invited her to come to church; due to an upcoming eye surgery she would be unable to come to church that week but she would the week after. She came to church yesterday and she loved every minute of it, staying for all three hours of church! We set up an appointment with her to meet that night, and while we were there we felt prompted to set a date with her too! We asked her if she would be baptized on June 23rd; she said she wanted more time, so she suggested pushing it out a month to July 22nd. We were ecstatic!

We had a great week in other ways too. Last week we had nine investigators at church. Since we thought it was just a fluke, that people who wouldn't normally come to church were doing so just because it was Easter Sunday. However, this week we busted our tail off and once again, we had nine people at church! The best part about all of this is that we think this next week is going to be even better. We think we can set one or two more dates in the next two days with even more potential for Baptism dates later in the week! We should have even MORE people at church, and so our only task will be to find even more new investigators than we already have.

Hope y'all have a great week!

Elder Jensen.