Well I was a little bummed when I heard about the DMV thing but I guess we'll just keep moving on, and even though bikes seem to be slowing things down a bit, we just broke Elder Rodriguez's record of 26 lessons by teaching 27 this week! It's way awesome seeing things just take off as we decide to teach at the first contact! We ended the week with another record for me of 11 new investigators! I'm way stoked because things are going fantastic with our 3 planned baptisms for the 25 of August and we're also excited to see how things are going to go with President's new battle plan of having the Oak Cliff Spanish mission work with mainly inactives and part member families instead of tracting...which...pretty much anything beats out tracting. It was so awesome to be able to talk to you guys and catch up with everything back home. So, my question for Rachel...how was the date with "the Hair"...and where was Natalie during that call? I missed hearing from her but I guess she's a busy high schooler now haha. This past week has been way awesome because I'm getting to the point where I start to feel like I'm actually in Mexico! More often than not I'm the only white guy in our group of Mexicans that we're teaching or going teaching with. A good amount of them don't speak a lick of English so it's a good test for my Spanish and it feels so awesome being able to understand all the jokes and take part in conversations that I thought were just a bunch of jibberish a couple months ago. But that's life here in Oak Cliff, just kicking it with my brothas from Mexico and staying safe from all of the drug trouble that's going on down here. And a message for you Dad, I remember when you were explaining what teaching the Hispanic population would be like, and all I have to say is you've been right on the dot. In your words, "All you have to do is recite the first vision and they'll say, 'Hey! That happened to my Uncle like a week ago! Where can I get baptized?!'" So in at least two of this weeks lessons, our investigators have told us that they had a dream where, in their words, "I saw a pillar of light, brighter than the sun, decending directly over my head...and then I saw my Lord and God." For some of them it happened a couple years ago and for others it was a couple days ago, but once I heard those words and translated them to English in my head, I pretty much heard your summary of my mission.
We did have a pretty cool expereince where we prayed and were very specific about the details of what we wanted to find. We wanted to be able to get in a door and teach a lesson before we called it a night, and then Elder Rodriguez looked at me and just told me to lead the way. So we walked around this neighborhood and I was trying to feel something special or some direction when I looked at every house, but nothing was really coming to me. So I felt like we had gone far enough, and I decided to just knock a random one that looked good...and we got nothing. So we prayed again and Elder Rodriguez led us to another door, and again, we got nothing. By this time he just wanted to knock down the row, door by door on another street, but I kept remembing this one house that we had passed about 10 minutes earlier, and I felt not much when we passed it, something small enough that didn't make me stop because I expected to feel something more, but for some reason I remembered just that one. So I told him about the house I kept remembering and we decided to go knock it. So once we made contact with the resident, we found out that it was an old lady who had been sick for a good amount of time, and not only did we get to teach her about the Restoration (which she had a dream of), but we were also able to give her a blessing. What a blessing it was to find someone so accepting and to be able to teach her in absolute silence, giving the spirit that much more of an opportunity to be present. Well in all, this has been a pretty solid week, even though we heard "long preaching" yesterday that almost had the result of Acts 20:7-9, but the work goes on. I miss you all and hope that things are going well and that you all are getting just as excited as I am about the Laker's "BIG 4!!!" Keep up all that you guys do to help the missionary work and I'm way stoked to hear that you're getting super involved Mom!
Love,
Elder Justin Wilson
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