January 20

Dear Family and Friends,

Wow yet another week gone by, it is so crazy how fast this week went.  It was an exciting week.  We taught a lot and a lot of investigators came to church which was great.

The other sisters in the branch had a baptism on Saturday, and then afterwards there was an area broadcast where they announced the Philippines goals for the year. There goals are to strengthen families, rescue the one, share the gospel, develop the church and save the rising generation.

I am always just in awe of how the Lord's hand is in this work.  I see it everyday.  Rodel and his two cousins came to church on Sunday it was so cool.  He was just so happy.  He also came to the baptism on Saturday and the Area Broadcast that followed.  He is so great and has such a strong testimony.  We taught him about the prophet on Thursday night.  It was a really weird night.  For some reason both Sister Flake and I were really struggling teaching in Tagalog, and he started speaking to us in English.  Turns out he is super good at English, but has just been to shy to speak it with us.  He was really excited when we showed him all the 12 apostles and gave him an Liahona to read about what the prophets have said.  He is actually a huge huge strength to Christian who testimony isn't quite as strong.  Speaking of Christian he is doing great.  Sister Flake and I put a picture of Jesus Christ on his Pedjack so that he could always see it when he was driving to remind him of his commitment.

We had exchanges this week with Sister Papica and Sister Eracho.  I went with Sister Eracho again.  So it was so much fun to be companions again for a day.


We also have a new investigator Brother Renatto.  He came to church on Sunday. We see a lot of potential in him. We are honestly so busy now, especially at nights we don't have time to visit all of them.  Right now we are working to keep on finding new investigators so that we will avoid the elevator effect from happening.  I really really really don't want to leave this area.  I just want to see all our investigators get more involved and be given assignments in the branch.  I know that Rodel and Christian and Ceriel are going to be so great for this branch.

I love our branch so much we played basketball with some members from the branch earlier.  It was a lot of fun. I have so many wonderful memories here.

So I don't know if I talked about Hartzell, but he is an investigator that we have only taught a couple times.  He is 16 and his mom is a less active member.  Sometimes okay all the time he usually tries to hide from us. But I have a lot of faith in him because I had a dream in which he was getting baptized and had a really strong testimony of the book of Mormon and was preparing to go on a mission.  So even though my companion thought that we should give up.  I am determined to help my dream come true.  On Saturday my dream was starting to come true.  He finally read.  We gave him an the story about Alma the Younger to read, and he finally did.  He told us what happened and loved it! And then he actually told us what time we could come back.  He didn't come to church because he is shy to go because he has no friends there, but hopefully this week we can get the young men to invite him to come to church with him.  After that lesson my companion finally said, I can see what you saw in him.  So this week he will hopefully come to church.

We still need to be diligent in finding new investigators this week especially ones that we can teach in the Mornings and in the early afternoon.  It is crazy our nights are super packed, but our mornings afternoons are really bare.

Well love you guys all so much!
-Sister Richins