Aaron's Baptism!!

Once again, Elder Pickering's email consists of him sharing daily recaps of the previous week.  The format may be different be I am loving hearing the details of his days.  I can tell that he is busy and working hard and seeing the blessings that come from it.

And as a side note from a mom, Ryan is down to 100 days left.  We can hardly believe it!

P-day
Just a normal p-day here for us, did basketball which is kind of a staple for us here. Every week we get together since this area has a ton of missionaries all close together and we play some ball, its always a good time. And then we attempted a few lessons, had some doorstep lessons with different people. And then on Mondays we always have dinner/ FHE with the Torres family which is great. We showed them the "Wheelz" video which is a classic, Elder Soderberg and I pretty much watch it daily.

Tuesday
Today was a long day here. We found this library that we were going to do language study in, and we walk in and there is this massive dog that apparently just lives in the library, so we got to have this dog do study with us. Also national pancake day at IHOP so you already know that we hit that up. We did some tracting and ran into this Hispanic JW, those are always quite the time, they'll just waste your time away talking. We also were able to have a lesson with Gregory tonight and had a member with us and watched the movie of the Restoration, he liked it, he is grasping the idea bit by bit, and then our member shared his simple testimony of how he grew to know the truth and that was super awesome. Also cool experience, a lady we are teaching wanted a new job, so we promised that if she read the Book of Mormon she would get a job this week, and then yesterday we heard she got a job!

Wednesday
Today we were out on that grind like usual and had some good times. We did this service in the morning at the food shelf and were able to help a bunch of people out which is always good. This afternoon we went back to an apartment we were at yesterday at just continued to get it all figured out and meet more people. Its easy to spend just days in some of these larger apartments and still know so few of the people, but today we were able to meet a ton of people and then set up return appointments for tomorrow. Also we had a lesson with this husband of a member and he is super cool. He has met with missionaries quite a bit in the past, but it seems they told him some interesting things that have made it hard for him to progress, but we will see what we can do for him!

Thursday 
Good times as always. We have district councils on Thursday which is good, our district isn't super huge, so it was chill. We gave a training, it's always a good time. We then went back to the big ol apartment building today and did some more work for about an hour got in a door and had a good time. We also did some other apartment buildings and met this African lady that had missionaries stop by a while ago and she was super cool! Been here for about a year and had question about the Book of Mormon, but just has a hard time understanding it in English. We also had a lesson with our lady that got a job that we promised her and she just wanted to pray and read the Book of Mormon and give thanks to God, she was super happy and excited about it all!

Friday 
Friday is the usual accounting and weekly planning stretch. We got to meet with a less active here named Barrascout who is just a legend, he is always a good time to meet with. And then the other really notable thing was that we got a call the other day from just this Hispanic we didn't know and they wanted us to visit. So today we had it set up and it turns out it is two returned missionaries who are up here from Peru. They are here for a little while for work and just have been missing being able to go to church, so we got to talk with them for a while, give them blessings and will find them a ride to church! And they are going to help us get a family we are teaching to church!

Saturday
Today I had the blessing of seeing Aaron get baptized!! It was super great! Also his twin brother showed up and pretty much confused all of the members on who was getting baptized, but it was super cool. I got to give a quick talk on baptism and then Aaron also gave his testimony and shouted me out and it was such a good sincere testimony, it was cool to hear some of the insider scoops of his side of it all. So he will be confirmed tomorrow and just moving on in the world! We also went to lunch after and I attempted this insanely massive burger in 30 minutes.. I lost.. :( but tonight we met this family that says they have been searching for the truth and the real church! So we are excited and will hopefully see them tomorrow at the church!

Sunday was good! Our church was at 1 this week so we went and stopped by people before to try and get some homies to come. We had so many confirm and say they would be there, but at the end of the day only our man Gregory came, but that's okay, he is awesome. Also our Sunday school lesson was given in Portuñol Spanish and Portuguese combined since the lady is from Brazil and that is quite the time. You can understand it all, but it sure uses some different parts of your brain. And not only that but Gregory knows some Portuguese so he was spitting it right back!

Also, in the pictures,  we are not playing playstation, just setting up a video for a message with a member haha. 

Aaron's baptism day!