Lovin' the Mission!

Language Improvement: Last night we went to a less active and she asked me if I had been here in the Philippines for a year! When i told her no I've only been here for 3 months she couldn't believe it. She said "You can speak Tagalog so well." So that was pretty encouraging.

Companion Talk: I love my new companion Elder Ramos! He's a really cool elder. He knows English pretty well so that's really good. I really like his style of teaching. He really teaches in a way that shows that we love the investigator. He speaks Tagalog really fast but I'm dong a pretty good job following the lesson and understanding what's going on.

Spiritual Moment: Yesterday I had a really awesome experience. We went to Cezar's with a member to start re-teaching him everything and we asked him what the greatest blessing in his life is and he said "You guys baptizing me." That was the first time I really felt the true joy from missionary service. In a very literal sense your entire soul is so happy when you hear something like that, happier than I've ever been before. The mission is all its cracked up to be!

Mission News: Elder Ramos and I have been more focusing on less actives this week. We will probably continue to do so cause Elder Nelson, who is the area 70 here, said that the first presidency wants to see real growth here in the Philippines. Last year we baptized 700 people here in the Philippines Naga mission and 80% of them our active, which is the highest active recent convert percentage in the Philippines. But our sacrament attendance did not increase. So that means that lots of people went inactive too. Elder Nelson said real growth is more active members. So a lot of the missions focus is being switched to less actives. There's a ton! In our ward we have 40 to 50 active members with around 350 members on the ward list. So there's lots of work to do. We still have investigators, we just don't do any tracking.

We got a new zone leader here too, His name is Elder Mckendrick. He's from Florida. He's a pretty cool guy. He's the only other American I ever have contact with now.