I LOVE MISSIONARY WORK!!!

Hola a todos...

I love missionary work and I`m enjoying and treasuring up every experience, blessing and miracle that I have experienced in the mission.   Juan Rodriguez was baptized and confirmed the newest member of the Belloni ward.  It was a great baptism and a 23 year old recent convert of the other 2 missionaries, named Mauricio, baptized him.  It was a great experience especially because it was the first time that Mauricio has baptized (He got baptized about 4 months ago) and now He is going to receive the Melquisedec Priesthood next Sunday in Stake Conference!  He is preparing to serve a mission when he hits a year of being a member. Speaking of Baptism...

Colin, now that you are a priest, you can now baptize. So start looking for your friends that you can help get to know the gospel and then you can personally baptize them! That`s so great that you are now a priest!!! I`m so proud of you! Keep those spiritual and priesthood muscles moving!!!
    
In Maroñas now we have 14 baptisms and we need 4 more, we only have 2 planned but I know that the Lord will provide miracles that it is still possible if all 18 of us in Maroñas work with all the determination and faith to be able to find 2 more people to baptize by next monday.

Elder Sasselli is a great companion and has a great testimony.  He is the first missionary in his family(his dad is a convert and his twin brothers are not wanting to serve a mission quite yet).  He and his family were inactive for several years when he was a teenager, but one day he felt the need to come back to church so he started to go alone to church every Sunday and later his mom and sister started going with him, now his whole family is active and his parents both have church callings.  He was the engine of his family train to get them back into the activity of the church.  Elder Kleinau was changed out (he had been here for 6 months already) and now we have a Paraguayan elder named Elder Dominguez in the house with us.  He is a great missionary and has a lot of faith and is always very excited to work in the work of the Lord.  Today for Pday, we are going up to another area, Toledo, and we are going to play soccer as a district at the church there.

Our investigators are doing good.  We didn`t have that many people to teach last week but we have found some good families that we are starting to teach so we will see how they progress and hopefully have some family baptisms in November.  We are planning an activity to get the recent converts excited about going to the temple to do baptisms for the dead!  It`s getting me excited to go on November 17th as a zone as well.  I haven`t gotten my garments package yet and I am going to make a Christmas request that would be greatly appreciated if it was sent a little earlier than Christmas... My shoes are wearing out and I will need some new church shoes soon. Other than that I can wait till I get home for other things.

Gracias for everything, I love you all so much and I know that we are all being blessed for the service that I am giving to the Lord.  Sorry I haven`t sent pictures yet, I almost lost about 96 photos when Elder Sasselli was copying a few over to his memory card and we were able to save them all but now they are on a USB that I cannot send in a letter, but I am waiting to send them in a package with your scripture cases that I just got last week. They turned out great, I hope you will enjoy and take good
care of them.

Love,
Elder Gardner