Tucson--#12

Hey Everyone!!

Chris and Alexia's baptism was awesome!!!!!!! Yvonne, who is the wife gave the talk on baptism and holy ghost. It was a great talk! You could tell that she was talking from the heart and not just reading some scriptures and explaining what they meant. She was grateful that Chris and Alexia were making this first step on their way to being sealed as a family in the temple! I ended up baptism Chris and Elder Woodland baptized Alexia. We were the second baptism of the morning so the font was rather cold. Alexia was shivering a little bit. I was nervous out of my mind to baptize Chris. I felt the spirit so strongly and I know that I was performing a saving ordinance of the Gospel. I am seeing D&C 18 start applying to my life. I have now experienced the joy of seeing not one but two people come unto Christ and now I want to get the entire city to come unto Christ. Maybe I should dust off my soap box and go to work! :) There was a pretty good turnout from the ward given that it was Thanksgiving weekend. The EQP and PP attended which was good for Chris and Alexia to get that support. After the baptism Chris asked if we could do the confirmation on Sunday. He asked me to confirm Alexia and Elder Woodland to confirm himself. Man, I thought the Spirit was strong at the baptism? Boy was I mistaken! After church we talked with the Otero's about the confirmation. They both noticed a change. Chris was more able to describe it. He said that he felt more at peace with his decision and knew that he was making the right decision. Hopefully, he gets the Aaronic priesthood next week or the week after so he can start administering the Sacrament. The ward is real supportive of us but we are still not getting any referrals from the ward. I hope that the ward notices that we are serious about missionary work, given that in the last 2 months we have had 4 baptisms. This Saturday we are meeting with the ward mission leader and are going to create a ward mission plan focused on member work. Member work is crucial to our success because tracting has gotten us no where with investigators. Elder Foster emphasized this when he visited that members are the ones who are supposed to find people so we can teach them. He told us that we need to make sure that the ward understands how easy missionary work can be, it all starts with a single invitation. Because we lost our two strongest investigators, we are going to focus strongly on finding new investigators. We are going to have multiple FHE's with ward members this week and hopefully get them pumped up for missionary work! One of our Thanksgiving dinners had to cancel so we ended up having dessert in the morning and two full meals in the afternoon. I was stuffed! (no pun intended) One of the families was the Samson's, who are less active and we baptized their 9 year old daughter, Ahdryanna last month. I feel like Christmas time is going to be the best time for missionary work. With the mormon.org/Christmas page and with the ward's help we should have enormous success in our area. That is so cool that Emma Hunt got her mission call! She is going to be a phenominal missionary! The field truly is white and is ready to harvest but the labourers are few and that needs to change and will change with the lower mission age. There should be an excess of labourers

Love,

Elder Urry

LiveStrong

D&C 76:22-24