Week 47 July 13

"Marking" appointments

Lina's smashed cigarettes

Well thank you all for the detailed updates that you all have give me
so that I can to take part in this difficult time for the family. I
am grateful to know that so many of you are all out there doing all
that you can to take care of the family and I am amazed every time
that this family is tested how quickly it passes through the tough
times and come out so much stronger and united.

The senior couple here shared a really cool story with me about Elder
LeSouer's 3x great grandfather that had his brother die young also in
a tragic accident. Then he actually was able to have an out of body
experience where he went and visited his brother and got too see where
he was and what he was doing. While he was there with his guardian
angel he actually talked to his brother and his brother introduced him
to a girl and asked his brother to go and ask her parents if they
could be sealed in the temple together, and that is what happened. It
was cool to compare it to things that were taken out of his
patriarchal blessing and it is amazing to see what miracles true faith
can bring. I know that Hayden is up there working to save a bunch of
people that we didn't get to while they were here in this life and to
honor his memory I will just have to work even harder to get them
while they are still alive to help lighten the load up there. I am
excited to be able to see him again one day. They gave me that to
read on the plane ride over Friday morning which really helped me to
get through the day. I had an amazing experience telling me that he
really is doing that work right now.

So to give you my update for the week we had our zone conference with
out new president. He and his wife are great people, good teachers
and really talented speakers which made it really entertaining and
uplifting to hear them speak. He has an interesting outlook and as a
Brazilian has a very aggressive approach to dramatically increase
baptisms. Unfortunately I was a little disappointed with the
interviews because it really wasn't all that personal and it was clear
that they both had basically a speech that they were giving instead of
really trying to take the time to get to everyone personally (good
thing it was a decent speech)

We have spent a lot of time working to help out Lurdes. Our
investigator that will be baptized this week. We had tried to get it
all ready so that she could be baptized this week but then our branch
president went into basically a full on interview with her and gave
here some doubts, which we quickly cleared up but the reason it didn't
end up going down yesterday was because we had to make some plans as
to how we could help her disabled daughter get to church because she
could not be left alone every week for the entire morning. But
thankfully we have some awesome members here that are willing to help
give her rides and take care of here for the foreseeable future.
(Check out the Mormon message lift if you haven't seen it yet we are
basically trying to do that here.) So we are going to make sure that
this time she will have a beautiful well planned baptism so that she
can have that as a testimony builder forever. She actually was
baptized once before in the church years ago but had a horrible
experience because she was not taught, living the commandments or
anything basically the Elders just threw her in the water because they
wanted a baptism on Christmas even though she wasn't even living the
commandments which when she found out that she should not have been
baptized she was offended and refused further contact. Thankfully we
were able to get back around to her and hopefully she will be able to
get passed all the negative influences in her life including her anti
(people in this branch) sister who we home teach. Her daughter should
follow her shortly after once she quits smoking which is happening
really fast. We had a powerful lesson with her daughter to get her to
quit and actually on our first meeting we go her to smash her last
pack of cigarettes which I have invited tons of people to do here,
because everyone smokes starting at about 10 years old, but it was the
first time that everyone has ever shown that kind of dedication for
me. It was so cool to see her mashing them up we even took some
victory pics to prove it. haha

Well I learned a lot this week. I love you all thank you for being
such an amazing supporting family!

Com Amor
Elder Hobson