July 4

I have had a good week!  We see miracles every day.

This week started out slow, because we had to go to Laoag on Monday which is about 6 hours away, and we were there until Tuesday, and didn't make it back to our area until Wednesday in the morning.  But we started working, and we started to see some success around Thursday.  It all started with a vision.  Not like Joseph Smith's vision though.  Just one of those visions that you make for where you want to be in life.  We talked about how we need to have a vision for the area,  a goal of what we are going to do to help God's children come into the fold.  So we started brainstorming and that is where things really picked up.  On Thursday we were able to teach some really good lessons, and met some new people.  On Friday we had a very productive weekly planning session, and were able to teach some good lessons to some investigators, who have since started progressing, and on Saturday we were able to find a lot of new investigators that have a lot of potential!  On Sunday when we got to church we had a lot of our investigators make it out to church, and they all had a really good experience.  It was so fun to see. I have really grown in my testimony of the need to really set a goal, and then work to achieve it.  It makes life move by so much faster.  I'm just sad that it took me so long to learn this simple lesson.

Angelica is doing good, we are just trying to finish all of the lessons before her baptism.  Her baptism is on July 16 hopefully, as long as we can get through all of the lessons before then.  But she is super excited for her baptism.  She is the only one that we have been able to talk to in her family.  Her parents are always in the rice fields when we go to her house, but we are hoping that this week we will get to meet them.  She was a refferal from one of the members.  He actually got her and her friend to go to church!

It was just the internet that was out last week, not the power.  But power outages are pretty frequent here in Gattaran.  Sometimes its just five minutes, sometimes it's longer.  But you learn to deal with it.  We aren't in the house most of the day so it usually isn't a problem.

The water that we get from the well is all of our water, except our drinking water.  We buy drinking water separate. We don't really have running water in our apartment.  For showers we have a big bucket, and then a little dipper that we use to pour water on ourselves.  That's pretty much how it is in the whole Philippines.  Well at least the Laoag mission.

As for budgeting, we withdraw all of our support on the first Monday of the month, and the I just use envelopes.  I put 1500 pesos in every envelope for every week, and set some money aside for water and electricity bills.  It's easier to budget when you can look at all of your money.

Thank you for all of your prayers, I pray that the Lord will bless you in all of your life.

Elder Childs