July 8

Dear Family and Friends,

Looks like everyone had a great 4th of July! Sister Lang and I celebrated it here with a nice cake and spaghetti so that was fun.  We even wore our blue skirts to celebrate. We are having a lot of fun here too after all if you aren't having fun, you are not doing it right!  

It was really sad this week our investigator Sheena told us that we can't visit her any more because it is just too much for her to endure with her dad.  Her dad hates the church and doesn't want her to get baptized.  We told her that we will always love her and care about her.  Sometimes it is just so hard, when they are so many negative feelings about the church. But hopefully someday she will have the faith and courage to come back.

We also met our new mission President this week.  He is super nice and his wife is so funny.  I was worried that he wouldn't know English very well, but turns out he was really good.  He is from Quezon City.  His family is really sweet.  They are two children that are still living with them.  One is 18 and just got his mission call to Boise Idaho.  The other daughter is 19 and is working of her mission papers.  I was excited because the Mission President's wife said that she was planning on proselyting with the sisters 3 days a week if at all possible.  That was exciting for me, it would be so great to have her strong testimony.  President and Sister Guanzon are both converts to the church and have been members since 1981.  They told us their touching conversion story on Friday.  It is exciting time.

President gave us some great counsel as well.  He said that there is about 700,000 members of the church in the Philippines and only about 150,000 that are activated.  We talked about what happened to those people that were baptized, but are not active now- they were not completely converted.  He emphasized teaching for understanding and teaching for conversion.  He also said that the Philippines need more leaders so to seek after the middle class and in his words "Talk to those with cars, dress a little nicer, use English."

We were able to teach a lot of investigators this week and a lot of them are progressing.  I still think it is such a miracle to see the change, we have so many people to teach now.  After the missionary broadcast we have a lot of members wanting to work with us which is great! Our bishop is also all of the sudden really interesting in missionary work.  Yesterday in Ward council and Ward coordination meeting we came up with a list of 15 names of less active members that the entire ward is going to work to reactive this year. 

We have three investigators that are high school students.  They are so sweet there names are Princess, Gema, and Michelle.  We had a great lesson with them on Tuesday about Joseph Smith.  Before we even got started she asked us, how she could know which of all the many churches were true.  Wow it was a great lesson! She also lives really close to the church house! This week we have some YW coming with us to teach them! Astig!

This is Sister Oberia's last week and she is committed to work hard until the end! Transfer announcements are this Saturday!

-Sister Richins