This Church Changes Lives.

Happy Monday everyone. :)) I hope you are enjoying your first day of a brand new week with brand new opportunities and ripe potential. We are so blessed to be able to live yet another week of our lives wherever we are. The opportunities and possibilities presented to us for growth and development are endless. I can truly promise each of you that if you acknowledge that truth and take advantage of the knowledge, everyone in your life will benefit from it, including yourself. The statement of YOLO (you only live once) is starting to resonate more and more with me. Not in the reckless crazy lifestyle people live persay, but in the fact that we really only do live once and this life deserves to be used and enjoyed to it's full extent. So, in closing of this random life essay I didn't know I was gonna write, be intentional about living because you're not gonna get the chance to do today over again. Enjoy every moment and embrace the now because "men (and women) are that they might have joy." - 2 Nephi 2:25

AHEM okay now that I've gotten rid of everyone who's not willing to read more than a paragraph let's get into the amazing experiences we had this week. I personally had quite a few experiences I will never forget and I'm just happy I got to be here for them. 

First off, Iris was baptized on Saturday. :)) We spent a good chunk of our time this week preparing for this baptism and working out the details of the program so that this experience could be the best possible for her, and let me tell you it paid off. Everything went off without a problem at all which was amazing. We had a couple dozen people attending in person and over 30 more attending virtually! We can safely assume that people were very excited for this baptism. The messages shared by missionaries and members alike, the ordinance itself, and then finally Iris' sweet testimony to conclude the service were all incredibly impactful. Elder Esquivel and I are truly just grateful we got to be the ones here to witness it. Her decision to make this promise to God has clearly changed something within her that you can almost physically see now. This observation was backed up yet again the next day in sacrament meeting when I had the unique privilege of being able to confirm Iris a member of the church. She sat back down on her bench afterwards with one of the biggest, most genuine smiles I've ever seen on anyone's face. I will restate what I said in the title of this email. This church changes lives and it does so because God himself is heavily involved in it's work. I've had way too many powerful experiences out here to think or believe otherwise. 

Now a small update on the work here: There are 2 great bikes that have been sitting in our teaching center here for quite some time. There's nothing wrong with them except for the fact that all 4 tires were flat. So, on Saturday after the baptism, we met up with our good friend Hasan and he took us over to a little bike shop run by two old men and they hooked us up. Now we've got two bikes that work perfectly well and we're about to start cranking on our less-active member work like never before. We've got a large number of pins on a map left to us by some missionaries from the days of ol' that we are going to use to start hunting some people down and giving nice little gifts to. We are highly optimistic that we will get in contact with some people who have needed the gospel brought back into their life and we are super stoked. We're also excited just to be able to zip around the city on these bikes too. We have a car, but parking is pretty bad in the cities in Albania so this is going to be so much quicker and convenient in all honesty. It's been really cold though the last little bit so I need to grab myself some gloves and a hat so my ears and fingers don't fall off of my body. We unfortunately will not have a lot of time this week to give to these member hunting shenanigans, but we are happy to get at least some in and then hopefully next week we can crank it really hard! 

Pday today was great. We had an Elders Kalceto football day which was a party, but I probably played a little too hard as per usual. Elder Perrine's ankle and my shin collided pretty hard haha. Apparently it made a good bone on bone clashing noise so that's neat. My shins bruised but surprisingly feels pretty good. I'm walking just fine but we will see how it feels tomorrow. My calf is really sore though which kinda stinks but kind of cool because science. 

Have a good week! Love you all. 

Photos