Baptism

Well, as far as this week, Ali got baptized on Saturday!!!!!! It's kind of a funny story. So we went out finding in the morning. We met one cool girl right before lunch, then we ate really fast so we would have enough time to fill up the baptismal font and set up the room for the baptism. Then when we got to the building, the closet with the water controls for the font was locked. Fortunately our assistant ward mission leader was planning on coming with the keys. He got there about 45 minutes before the baptism service was supposed to start, and we quickly started filling the font. Well, starting time rolled around, and the font still wasn't full, so we all sat and listened to prelude music for a while. Finally, we decided that even though the font wasn't full it seemed close enough, so we turned the water off and got started. We should have left the water running in the background while we started, but we weren't quite that smart. The service started out great, Elder Durtschi was giving the talk on baptism and he ended up ditching everything he prepared and just shared a really powerful testimony about baptism. The spirit was so strong! Then Ali and I walked into the font, and I immediately realized that we should have let the font fill more. It was about as full as the font was when I baptized Dannika, but she was eight years old, and Ali is definitely quite a bit bigger than her. But, I had faith that we could make it work, so we went ahead and did it. I had to push him down under the water to where he was just about laying down on the bottom of the font, but we did it first try! Then he just about pulled me down with him when he came back up, but that's okay, we made it out okay.  I'm told there was a really awesome testimony meeting while we were changing, but I missed that for obvious reasons. When we walked back in Ali simply said, "That was good." And I think that sums it up pretty well. Then, come to find out yesterday that the investigator that the sisters in my district brought to the baptism from their area committed to be baptized while they were on the way out of the baptism, so that's super awesome as well! It was a great day. 

That's all I really have time to write today because I got transfered! I'm down in Santa Ana now which is the opposite side of our mission. To give you an idea of how tiny our mission is, it took a good twenty minutes to drive from the Birch Hills apartment to here and that was pretty well end to end. My companion's name is Elder Vaitai, and so far he seems really great! He's been telling me about all the people they're teaching right now in this ward, and I'm really excited, I think it's going to be a great transfer. I'll send pictures from the baptism and one of Elder Vaitai and me.

Love you guys!

-Elder Clark

Mother's day

This week was really good! We taught Ali the rest of the principles he needs to be taight before baptism and did a fair amount of planning for that since it will be this Saturday. ☺ We're super excited for him, it's going to be a great day! We also were able to read from 3 Nephi 11 with one of our other investigators, and she had a pretty cool spiritual experience while we were reading. 

Nothing else too interesting happened until Friday, but the weekend was pretty busy! We had lunch at Panda Express with someone who had a table set up at Cal State the same time that we did a few weeks ago. He was really nice, he bought us lunch, we got to know each other, then he started to talk to us about why we shouldn't believe the Book of Mormon is true. He has definitely done some extensive research, but when it came down to it he didn't have anything that hadn't been said before, and I didn't find any of it very convincing. 

After dinner Friday we went to Down Town Brea because they were having a country music festival and there were a lot of people to talk to. Lots of businesses had booths set up, and we brought a table. We asked the security person if it was okay to set up our table. She said as long as we didn't have any alcohol we were good, so we snagged a little corner where no one was set up and started talking to people. It was really fun, we talked to a lot of people! I was able to hand out two Book of Mormons, one in English and another in Farsi, and the other missionaries there had quite a bit if success too. We decided we'd go back again Saturday, but that time we got caught. We set up a little earlier since we had so much success, and this time we picked a spot that was less out of the way so that more people would come by the table. That turned out to be a bad move because as we finished setting up a different security person than the one we talked to the first time came up to us and told us we couldn't set up there. I was surprised they even let us do it the first day, so it was all good. 

This week I also finished reading the Book of Mormon again, and I know without a doubt it is true. It really does testify of Christ, and as we read it I know that we come closer to Him. Make this week awesome, I love you guys! 

-Elder Clark

hummingbird

This week went pretty well, we met a couple people that seem like they're pretty cool, but we haven't taught them yet, we just scheduled lessons so I don't have too much to say about them. I went on two exchanges this week, first I was back in the YSA with Elder Mariano. We had a service in the morning and he had to do a zone leader thing in the afternoon, so we didn't end up having all that much time to actually proselyte, but it was still a pretty good day. Elder Mariano was fun to work with, and the member who took us to dinner took us to this place called Roscoe's. They serve fried chicken and waffles, and it was delicious. Plus they had this really fancy looking drink that was actually just lemonade, orange juice and fruit punch, but it's layered so it looks like a sunset. (I took a picture because I never eat at fancy places and I thought it was cool)

On Saturday I went on exchanges with Tri city so I was back with my MTC comp Elder Hart! We worked hard all day and had a blast, it was fun to be with him again and do missionary work for reals this time. It's cool to see how much he's grown from when we were wandering around the MTC with no idea how to be a missionary to now. 

On Sunday President and Sister Golden came and visited our ward for sacrament meeting and Gospel principles, so they got to meet our investigator who's on date. He's learning so fast, he answering questions and sharing insights like he's known the gospel his entire life. 

That's mostly the whole week. Oh, for Mother's day this week we're planning on doing skype calls around 3:30. Will that work for you guys or is that during church? We could do a different time if we need to. 

Love you!

-Elder Clark

Pictures: Roscoe's and a hummingbird nest that was at a doorstep we knocked on. The eggs were smaller than my thumbnail.

Just keep knocking on doors

This week went pretty well! We were able to meet with someone I met with our ward mission leader the first week I was in this area. She was semi-interested the first time I talked to her, but I didn't write down her address, so we tried to find her a few times but could never remember what house it was and I sort of forgot about her. Our ward mission leader brought her up in a ward correlation meeting a week or two ago, then on Wednesday he joined us for some finding in the evening. We tried to visit a few people without any luck, so we decided we were going to go and find her. We knew what street it was on, so we slowly drove down it and every time we saw a house that one of us thought might be it we got out and knocked, and at the fourth or fifth house we knocked on we found her! She remembered us and let us in to share a message! She's pretty cool, she's going to read the Book of Mormon and watch President Nelson's talk from the most recent general conference. 

On Thursday we did exchanges and I brought Elder Kim into my area with me. We had the slowest finding day of the entire week, but our lesson with Ali went really well and he doesn't teach many lessons in Yorba Linda, so my main goal with the exchange was to get him some experience teaching a lesson. We focused the beginning of our lesson on helping him read the Book of Mormon every day because he had been reading it often, but not every day yet. We gave him a little advice about how to remember and then on Thursday or Friday he sent us a text talking about a miracle he had at walmart while buying shoes for a new job, and he told us he's definitely going to keep remembering to read every day because he knows that it really works and the Lord really does bless him!! He also participated a lot in gospel principles class on Sunday, and he's basically just the best. 

There was other stuff, but I'm kind of tired of typing, so I'll just call that good. The work's going really well, I'm loving it!

-Elder Clark