December 2nd, 2008 (Email)

Hey!
OK first thing first: Christmas list eh?Here's what sounds good to me: candy, restaurant gift cards, cool ties, letters, candy, letters.... and cool ties. And pictures. Yeah that sounds about good. If you send me stuff I will like it. And I will eat it. I wonder how much I weigh now... Ever heard of Claim Jumpers? Their Sirloins are DIVINE.
No Sam didn't get baptized last week :( She needs to get baptized before Elder Rodriguez leaves! He's been in Buena Park for almost 9 months now and he's been working with her for a long time and she has a testimony and she's had several baptism dates but no go! She says she knows its right. But her mom says otherwise. But it'll happen. Well see.
Yesterday INCREDIBLE things happened! So all of our appointments seemed to be ditching us for the first half of the day. So we decided to knock some doors before visiting David and Dixie. For some reason some stuff happened during the first three doors so that it took a while before we could reach door 4. We herd the alarm going off in Door 2 so we checked the front and back of the apartment but we saw no fire. Door 3 complained that we woke him up (4:30 in the afternoon) All sorts of stuff happened so that we arrived at door 4 JUST AS the guy who lived there was arriving home. The wife answered the door as the husband came from behind us and walked in his apartment. 5 minutes later we found ourselves in the apartment talking and starting a lesson. The wife's name is Suzanna and she's a member. The husband's name is Raymond and he's not. They told us they haven't been to church for months. Raymond had been taking the lessons before they moved to this apartment in September but he said he didn't do "the last thing." We asked if that last thing happened to be baptism. He said "Yeah! That! I need to do that! Can we do that? Where's the church? When can I be baptized? Can you give me the lessons again?" So we taught them lesson one, they commited to come to church and we set a date for Raymond's baptism -- Dec. 14th. Yeah. Amazing. Then we visited David and Dixie and they fed us amazing mexican food again and we gave their daughter Delilah a Priesthood blessing (she has crazy dreams and sleepwalking stuff so they talked to the bishop and he told them to ask us to bless her) I got to be voice so that was neat. Okay, so their son George is 13. Here's what's happened with him since we started visiting them: he's gone to church, he likes church, he's EXCITED for church, he asked for a button up shirt and slacks, and during this appointment we found out he cut his mohawk and told David and Dixie that he wants to be baptized. Wh-h?-!so...yeah. Wow. Amazing things are happening in Buena Park. And Sabrina Sanchez is still good for Dec. 10th. I think I told you about her right? Her dad's a member - she's not. She's 21 and she's turning her life around- she's meeting with us, repenting, quitting coffee, praying, reading the scriptures, and getting baptized on the 10th. It's gonna be a great month.
Thanksgiving was good. We ate with the Woolfenden family. They had 4 huge dogs and 1 little one so that was crazy. We ate Thanksgiving dinner OUTSIDE under the blue sky and sunlight. Oh to be in California. :)
Elder Rodriguez is the hardest of the hardcore. Yeah. He's an amazing Elder and I'm blessed to have him training me. It's so cool to live with the District Leader and the Zone Leaders. Elder Esterholdt is the oldest Elder in the mission and I'm most definitely the youngest. Elder Berardy and Elder Rodriguez call me Lucky Charm Lewis now whenever something amazing happens. I got it a bunch last night after we told the ZLs about Raymond. But I know that it has nothing to do with me. THE LORD DOES HIS OWN WORK!!!
Love,Elder Tyler Lewis
(P.S. I'm going to try and send some pictures on the other computer now so that's on its way. I'm kind of nervous about sending the SD card and it's not even close to being full yet so I'm going to try this first.)