The term President Watkins coined for being incredibly busy all day, everyday is running. We were running this week.
Let me start out by saying, we had a baptism! One of the lady's we teach has been meeting with the missionaries for a while and was baptized on October 29th. I didn't have much role in teaching her, but I did teach her a few times. Most of the work was already done when I got here. It was still cool. It takes a lot of time to set up and prepare for a baptism. This took a huge chunk out of our time this week to teach, but that is ok, baptisms are what this is all about.
In addition to all the district meetings we have to go to (four of them) we had a zone leader training in San Jose Friday morning. Rather then dump me off with a random companionship in Santa Cruz, my companion decided to take me with. I learned a lot in the meeting, but the highlight was that I learned the difference between a turbo turbocharger and supercharger. President Watkins really loves cars and racing. It was a great meeting, but we weren't able to get back to our area till about 3:00. This, the baptism, and the district meetings took a huge chunk of time out of our teaching. It was OK though since we were running.
This week we were successful in hitting 140 contacts and 20 lessons. We also have a ton of prospective investigators that we are trying to set up appointments with so that we can start teaching them. Some of them are very well prepared. We met one, a 19 year old, outside the back of a shopping center while we were contacting. We randomly went to the back, even though we were contacting and we had to talk to a lot of people. We didn't know why we were going back there, but now we know why. He is a really nice kid, and we came back to teach him about the Book of Mormon. We followed up and he said he had read and prayed about it. Problem is, he doesn't have a phone, so he is really hard to get a hold of.
One funny thing that happened this week was at the Halloween party and trunk or treat. An investigator was having trouble figuring out what to dress her 3 year old up as. We get to the trunk or treat and he is a missionary! It was so funny. We walked him around and kept handing him cards that he would then give to people walking by. We need to take him contacting with us. That family that we are teaching is awesome. My companion says he has never seen as much of a change as with the mom. She had some incredibly problems. Right now she is slated to be baptized the 12th. The spirit does incredible things and works an incredible amount of miracles. This gospel truly does change lives.
Thank you all for your letters and support. All is well in Salinas.
-Elder James Richards
Elder Miller, my companion, and I before the baptism.
Baptism on the 29th. She has a phobia of water. She ended up being fine during the baptism.
Logan, the missionary! We walked around the trunk or treat with him and had him hand out mormon.org cards