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