Weeeeeell… Just livin’ here in Peru and all.
This week’s been good because we married and baptized a family, which is always really great (And also means lots of photos!). So here we go:
First, a picture of the happy couple:
“Awwwww! How cute!”
…But we Elders had to coolify it up a little bit.
One of the ideas we got from a sister in our branch is that we could bring some of the swords from an activity the Primary did recently and we could salute all the couples as they walked through. So we got together a few other missionaries and we stood there with the swords for everyone.
We were probably the coolest Elders in the wedding, if I do say so myself.
Then, of course, the baptism! I would have liked to be the one to baptize them, of course, but since we can’t do that now they chose the branch president. We were hoping that, because it was hot, the water would be at least a little warmer than the frigid ice water that it normally is, but… no luck. At least it was hot outside!
But yeah, so we’re all pretty good here, with cool pictures of us with swords and things like that. But by far the coolest part is seeing how the family we baptized, William and Maria, have changed. In their baptism, they both bore their testimonies about how they felt now. Maria went first and said something short and sweet about how, when we started teaching her the Gospel, she just felt… freer. She felt like all of this let her leave behind some weight that she didn’t realize that she had before, and when she said this I realized that she reall did seem… freer. There’s always something different about people when they change and start to follow Christ, and I could actually see that she seemed lighter and more free.
William did something that I haven’t seen before, but still something that I thought was really cool. He started by bearing a short little testimony, and then said a prayer out loud, in front of everyone, in which he promised to God that he would be faithful and would be obedient, but he asked that He would help him to do it. That was interesting, but I liked it a lot (Maybe it’s because we did the sword, knight-like thing in the wedding!).
But yeah, it’s all good here. We’re just working hard to try and help some other people to see this light that William and Maria have found.
— Elder Schroeder