MAYbe it's Mother's Day this week

This week has been fantastic!  A throw down or two from the Spirit, exchanges, and slightly sleep deprived, but hey, that's the life of a missionary often times.  XD

We have a 10 year old investigator, Roman, who's mom won't let him get baptized yet, and he struggles a lot.  He didn't/doesn't really feel loved, so we have just been visiting him with the goal in mind that we are going to love him, and it's been really different the last couple times!  He's given me a stuffed animal- a panda (THE big fat panda  ;) and before, he would ask that we keep our lessons to "under 30 seconds". The only problem with that is that he gets super distracted so we'd end up being there for around an hour and only get 4 sentences in on the lesson that we wanted to share.  But yesterday, when we said that we could keep it short, he told us that we could go "full length" if we wanted to.  He still got super distracted, but it was even cooler!  For that lesson we had planned to sing "I am a Child of God" with him, but he had a friend/cousin over, so when we told him that we were going to sing, he pulled out a toy piano, got his friend/cousin and his little sister there... and we sang it with our little band!  I played the melody on the piano and we were singing also while he had a rattle thingy that he used. It was a lot of fun, but that's not even the best part! He sees praying as not really worth it because it "takes too long" so we ask him to say the closing prayer most days, hoping that that will change.  Except for yesterday, when we asked him and he said no, his friend that was there offered to say it, but he didn't know how.  So Roman taught him!  Elder Jackman and I weren't mad in the least bit, that was even cooler than we thought!

Then we went to his aunt's house and found out how we can help her return to activity- family history!  She has 4 generations (when I say 4 generations back, I mean she knows who here great great great grandparents are and has records for ALL of their descendants) ready to do the work for them, she just hasn't put them in the computer yet, so we know what we're going to be helping her with!!

Next we went to a different 10 year-old's house, Dylan, a recent convert whose family has bounced in and out of activity, but who is going to start taking temple prep classes.  We found out that Dylan's dad, Glenn, who struggled occasionally with a drinking problem, and his wife went to the temple grounds and walked around- just them as a couple!  They are excited to go to the temple, and they would be the first in either of their families to go through the temple and be sealed as a family!

They did a musical fireside last night for the 4 Albuquerque stakes, along with the Rio Rancho stake and the Los Lunas stake, and there were so many people there!  It was awesome, even though it made me miss my viola a little bit more than usual, but that's alright!

The rest of the week was still fantastic, but I figured I'd share all the miracles that happened just yesterday.

Te whanaunga mo ake tonu!!  :)

Elder Eli James Dial

PS- this is not the panda that Roman gave me, this is the new one he got.  XD