4 Months Down, 20 To Go

Well hello everyone! Hope everyone is doing well! This past week was pretty good for me, I hit my 4 month mark and today is February! Seems just like yesterday I arrived to Culiacan and started my mission. Also, I finished the Book of Mormon in Spanish for the first time on Jan. 30th, 2016. My testimony of the Book of Mormon has grown so much over the last 4 months, and I know that it is the word of God. The Book of Mormon is the most correct book on the earth, and through the Book of Mormon, we can learn more about faith, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end. Now that I've finished the Book of Mormon in Spanish, I'm going to restart from the beginning, but also at the same time I'll be reading the New Testament. I invite everyone who hasn't read or isn't reading the Book of Mormon to pick it up, start reading, and pray about the truthfulness and the divinity of this book. I know that Heavenly Father answers prayers, for He has answered mine. I also invite you all to read Moroni 10:3-5, ponder in your hearts the meaning of the Book of Mormon, and I know that by the power of the Holy Ghost, you'll receive your answers.

Anyways, I'll give my brief summary of this past week:

Tuesday, weekly district meeting, a few lessons, and we put 3 baptism dates for Rafael, Xochitl, and Jessica for March 6th, and we finished the night teaching a few more lessons.

Wednesday, we walked about 30 minutes to some communities that are separated from Culiacan. These communites are part of our area, but since they're so far out, we rarely have the time to go all the way out there. We're starting to visit this part of our area once a week, there isn't much work, but hopefully we can get things working in this part of the Lord's vineyard. We went to visit Candelario in his little farm, and we were cutting some firewood for him with machetes haha. I was really tired after this day, we walked close to 10-12 miles overall.

Thursday, we had some lessons, but it was somewhat slow this day.

Friday, we had our weekly planning session, we taught some lessons, and we were working on updating our area map. We're trying to locate every single inactive member that we have on our lists of members.

Saturday, well the morning was really slow, a lot of families left town this weekend. We worked hard to find people to teach, and we taught a few lessons.

Sunday, we had church, then we walked the long trek home, sweating in our suits haha. After lunch, we got to work, but our appointments fell through and again, not many people were home. So we worked on our map project. We taught a few lessons today. 

Somehow, my companion and I managed to achieve our goal of 35 lessons this past week. The level of excellence in the mission is 30 lessons a week. So two weeks ago, we had like 32, this week we had 36. My companion and I are working hard and trying to stay diligent to teach as many people as possible. Either today or tomorrow, my companion and I are going to learn how to make flan from a sister in the church. So yeah, that's about it for this week. I'm doing well, the people offer us water, fruits, and meals almost all the time. I love Culiacan and the people here.

Stay classy, Baltimore!

Elder Finkner