I felt like that was a blessing from the Lord...

Fam!!!,

Hey everyone how are you all?? Happy New Year!!! Wow we are now in 2011, can you believe that? It’s so crazy how fast time has gone by. This last year went by so fast that it really surprised me. Wow that is crazy that Jordan will be taking off this week. I bet he is way excited but also a little bit nervous about going? The family that he is going to live with knows Spanish or no? That’s cool that he gets to know Mexico and learn Spanish. I am sure that he is going to love it. Wow, Taylor going to the temple- that is way cool. When I talked to him he was telling me about that and said he was pretty excited.
Ok so just like the last time New Years was so crazy!! They burned those big dolls that I told you guys about the last year. I got some pics of a few this year and I’ll see if I can send you guys some today. Ok so on the 31st we had to be in our house by 2pm in the afternoon and we couldn’t leave our house until 2pm the next day. The thing that stunk is we really couldn’t see them burning the dolls very well because they took them out to the main street to burn and we couldn’t see and we couldn’t leave our house to go and look. But luckily one of the members that lives by our house came by and picked up our cameras and took them out to take videos of all the burning. So I did get some pretty cool videos. I’ll have to send them when I have enough pics to send back in a CD. It was pretty much impossible to sleep so we ended up playing chess all night lol. No we played until 12.30 then things started to calm down and that’s when we went to bed. But ya it was pretty crazy. I would have to say that last year was more crazy because I wasn’t used to Ecuador at that time. lol but it was still cool. To tell you the truth, I am glad that it is all over because it was a little bit hard to work during the last two weeks. So many people were drinking and they all had their families visiting and all that good stuff. So it was a little hard. I think things should be picking up here in this week that is coming.
ok so you asked about the baptism. Well as of right now we don’t have anyone with baptism dates. We had a few but they didn’t go to church this last week so they lost their dates. We are going to just keep working. We have a few people that are really good, we just need to help them get prepared for baptism. Or we have people we just need to ask them to get baptized. I am pretty sure that this week we are going to have a really good week. I can just feel it. Now that the holidays are over and things are getting back to normal.. I am pretty sure that if we work hard we will be able to have baptisms in this month. 2 or 3, but we have to work hard. This last Sunday I felt really bad because when we got to church we didn’t have any investigators in church, and we had worked hard and invited so many. Also we went by their houses in the morning but they didn’t show up. Really I felt horrible. We worked so hard but it all felt like it was for nothing. During Sacrament meeting I honestly felt like crying. I started to pray and pray and asking the Lord for help. Because if we don’t have people in church we won’t have baptisms. Well we went to the other 2 hours of church and at the end we went to a meeting with the bishop and the ward mission leader and as we were in the meeting, one of the counselors of the stake president knocked on the door and asked if we were the missionaries from the ward la pradera. I told him yes and he said that he had an investigator for me and called this lady in with her daughter. We found out where she lives and found out that she had gone to church with her boyfriend awhile back in another ward and that she wanted to look for the ward that she belonged to so she went to another building this last Sunday and found the counselor of the president and he brought her to our ward. She went to the other ward and I believe she was there for church and everything. Ok long story short I don’t know why but I felt like that was a blessing from the Lord, and I feel like she will be a future baptism. Tomorrow we are going to teach her, and the bishop is going with us. So we hope all goes well. We also have so many other good people to teach, we just hope that they go to church this coming week.
Well I have been talking too much and we are going to go play b-ball so I think I am going to let you all go. I love you all and I want you all to know that I know that the church is true and I love this work and I love the mission. Also I love you all very much. Thanks for everything!!

Love,
Elder Keables