Hey Folks

It sounds like it was a good week back home. Especially for Mason. That is so cool to hear that you made the all-star team. I really hope that he will be able to make it on the team at the U. At the very least he will make some friends on the team.

It was a really good week here too! We taught 28 lessons! And we had 2 baptisms. Jairee Young got baptized and so did Emily Waters. Jairee is 9 and his mom just got reactivated in the church. So it was just a process of teaching all the lessons and then baptizing him. Pretty easy.

Emily was harder. She is 17 and her parents were baptized in March and it was a matter of time before she was baptized too but she was nervous. She felt pressured and wanted to wait a couple months before she did it. She knows it's true so we tried to encourage her without pushing. And then after church last Sunday she texted and said she wanted to get baptized the next Saturday. I think I put that in my email last week. Well, the baptism happened. It was a very good one. She invited a lot of her non-member friends and her siblings, who aren't members, invited their friends too. So we had a lot of non-members there for the baptism. And then after the ordinance was done, Emily wanted to share her testimony. So she did and it was really cool. After she bore her testimony two of the young women in the ward also bore theirs. And her mom bought her a quad with her name engraved on it. It was a really good baptism. I like that family a lot.

A perk of working in the Tri-Cities is that President comes to baptisms. I sent Sister Greer a text about 30 minutes before Jairee's baptism and they were able to come. So they were there to meet all of Jairee's family. Jairee's family on his dad's side are all non-members. It was great to have President there for that.

Also, I got a text from AP Fenn telling me that Frances Woods got baptized and confirmed in Cathlamet this weekend. So everything happened that needed to. That was very good news as well. The work is still moving forward. We still have 3 people on date. Connie Ramirez for August 11th. Linda for June 23rd. and Baby Ann for June 23rd. Each of them wants to be baptized. Linda will be the toughest to get there. She and her fiance have a hard time following through with commitments. They know they need to come to church and read and pray but they don't always do it. However, with them we can be very straight forward and kinda boss them around ha ha. That is what we did in the last lesson at least.

We also had 4 new investigators last week. As a mission, the push that we are going for right now is finding new investigators. The trend has been in the past that we need to find about 13 new investigators before we get a baptism. That is the average. So we are putting in an effort to find as many as possible. That's what we're focusing on right now.

Well. That was our week. It was a good one. I didn't get any letters at all this week... Bummer. Keep praying for me.

Love,
Elder Paxman


Also... killed a chicken today. And blood got all over my white shirt... That was a bummer. But the chicken is dead!