Email February 23, 2014

Hello I'm really tired right now so this email may not be too exciting haha. This week was a good one, we finally have an investigator who accepted to be baptized! His name is Jorge and is the best friend of our ward mission leader--member missionary work is so effective. We taught he and his son the Restoration and he accepted it immediately. He's not a really religious person, in fact, he's just recently started trying to find God in his life. But he's really humble and really prepared for the gospel. His only struggle is that he works every Sunday, so we're praying for him and looking forward to teaching him again. We have had a little bit of success in our own personal efforts to find investigators. A lot of people have invited us to come back to their houses, but now it's a question of teaching them. We did get to teach a family this past week, but when we invited them to be baptized they didn't accept. We're going to go back and teach the Restoration. Zone conference with pres. Smartt was this past Friday: it was the longest conference of my mission. I had to be there are 10 in the morning for a leadership meeting, and then after we were there for a full zone conference until almost 8:30 at night. Gaaah. It was long but it was really great too. We talked about the Fall of Adam and I learned a lot. It's incredible how you can always learn so many new things in the gospel. President Smartt is really smart--that's why they gave him that name haha. He invited all of the disobedient missionaries in our mission to go home in our zone conference. He's not here to mess around. He's pretty chill about most things, but he lives the mission manual. Our bishop gave a lesson about home teaching to the priesthood yesterday that was actually pretty good. He and his counselors have asked the ward to fast next week for missionary work to move forward. But their number one goal is to strengthen the priesthood and get them doing their home teaching visits. I am one hundred percent behind that. That will bring more baptisms to the ward and will strengthen the members spiritually. The weeks are all the same right now. I'm happy but I'm getting tired haha. I'm really grateful to be with Elder De Oleo, he's a really big motivation for me. He helps me to keep doing this work when I'm tired, which is really great because I don't feel like I'm alone in the work with him. He's probably my favorite companion. I love you all so much! Elder Cevering