Happy pi day! I know it's not quite as cool as last year, but if you think about it, pi can be written as 3.1416 if you round it to the fourth decimal point. So it's almost as cool. But that isn't nearly as cool as this week was, because Eddy and Marlon finally got baptized! They asked me to perform the ordinance, so I actually got to baptize someone myself for the first time since Juan Antonio, back in my first area. As usual, organizing the baptismal service was a lot of work, and it took up a big chunk of the week. We had to redo the baptism records, since they moved last week. Then we redid the program twice and went and printed it out. Thanks to a successful ward council meeting last Sunday, we were able to get members of the relief society and young men for the talks. And there were snacks at the end. All in all, it went off without a hitch. And I got lots of pictures. On Sunday they got confirmed by members of the ward, and we got to be in the circle. The energy was really high, since this is the first baptism the ward has had since May of 2014, before I even got my mission call! And to make it even better, it was ward conference, so the entire stake presidency was there! They made a pretty big deal about it later in the stake correlation, because they want to ride that energy to get the whole stake more excited about missionary work. They just called a new high councilor over missionary work, and he REALLY knows what he's doing. He was a mission president and everything, and absolutely loves The Power of Everyday Missionaries. He even used it with his mission! I'm actually really excited about what he'll be able to do with missionary work in this stake, because most of the members suffer from "Utah syndrome" where they think there aren't any nonmembers left who aren't anti. But there are! The other fun thing this week was a special training we did with President Spendlove. He came and did this big thing about how we aren't finding enough new investigators and to find more, we need to work with members and less active members. They're our real key to finding more people. He did some math on the black board and if we were to get 1% of our active members to give us one solid referral each transfer (that's not impossible!), our finding would triple. Same goes for less active members. I personally can support that, because if I look the people who were baptized over the course of my mission, about 3/4 of them were referrals from members or referred themselves because of member friends or family members. And that's what I did back in Rose Park to take a dead area and revive it. We worked hard to get referrals from the ward, and it did a lot! He also talked about a bad habit that many of us have, which he called "working the list." A lot of times we'll get into an area, especially if it's a whitewash, and ask the leadership for referrals. And they'll give us a list of less active members and say, "here you go, try them." So we begin at the beginning, and go until we reach the end, and then stop. It ends up wasting a lot of time, so what President said we should be doing is putting it in the hand of the Spirit by praying to ask which of them we should visit. He talked a lot about finding by the Spirit, which makes sense because who knows better than Him who is ready and who isn't? After all, that's why we don't tract in this mission. Because it's just the same as working the list. But even less time efficient. I guess I'll end off here just to make sure these pictures go through. And besides, the rest of the week was nothing compared to Saturday and Sunday! I love these kinds of weekends! Love, Spencer
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