Yay for baptisms!

This week was great!

Ok so we'll start with the best news first! Sister Torres sent me my planners and they're so cute! I'm so excited to use them!

Anyway, one of our investigators, Reece, is 9. A few weeks ago his mom (a less active member) had surgery and it didn't go well so they had to go to Carson City for a few weeks to stay with her parents. This weekend Reece came home! He is awesome! He's been excited for baptism since the missionaries started teaching him in June or so. The only hold up was that he didn't ever come to church. While they stayed with Reece's active grandparents, he went to church pretty much every week. He loves primary! Now we just need to teach him a couple more things and he needs to get in the habit of coming to church here and he'll be baptized.

We also had a mission tour this week! Elder Robbins of the presidency of the 70 came and visited us. From 1 to 5 on Friday we had trainings from President and Sister Chesnut and Elder and Sister Robbins. It was great! It was very spiritually draining because there was so much good stuff! And it was pretty amazing because there was a lot of math and stats and such involved so I was pretty much geeking out over that the entire time. He also encouraged us to find out a good method for studying our scriptures and keeping a study journal. He told us his method for highlighting his scriptures, which I learned was very similar to mine so that was pretty cool! For those of you who don't know how OCD I am, my scriptures are color coded with 7 different colors according to what the scripture is talking about.
Oh ya I guess we had a baptism this week...? Almost forgot ;) It was amazing! I'm not sure if I've told you about Mateo so here we go...
On December 9th we got a text from Christin​a (a member of our ward) asking us to come over and see them that night and she told us that she had big news. So we went over and she was there with her boyfriend that she had been living with for some time. They then announced that they had gotten married and that he wanted to be baptized and that they wanted to go to the temple! (For those of you at home, that doesn't happen often in missionary work.) We were super excited and we began teaching him. At this point he had already been coming to all 3 hours of church for 2 weeks. He also had been having gospel discussions with Christina and was praying a lot. He had already gotten into the habit of reading the Book of Mormon and some days he would read for 2 hours. He only missed 1 Sunday out of the 7 before his baptism and in that time we taught him multiple times a week. He continued to be excited for his baptism! In preparation for his baptism, I called every active member of the ward while Sister Gali did language study. It only took around 3 hours for me to call all of them. Many people were surprised that he was getting baptized because they thought that he was already a member just visiting from another ward because of the way that he behaves and interacts with his wife and daughter. Most people in the ward knew Mateo and he had a few friends by the time he was baptized! I was a little worried as his baptism was about to start because only about 10 or so people were there. By the end of the opening hymn, there were over 50 people at his baptism. We ran out of chairs in the primary room where we were meeting and Sister Gali and I had to stand in the doorway with a few other people. It was such a great turnout! Sister Gali and I got up and bore our testimonies at the end and I invited Mateo to come up and bear his testimony. He got up and his testimony was so powerful! Afterwards he talked to the investigators that other missionaries had brought with them and talked to them about baptism. Mateo was essentially the most golden investigator ever. We're sad that the ward will now be doing his new member lessons and we won't be seeing him much anymore.

Welp I guess you could consider it a slow week in the Mt Rose ward. I'll try to come up with something more exciting for next week.

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)