My Golden Family

Well its taken a year but I've finally begun to fulfill my Mission Dream: to baptize an entire Family into the true Church. We found them at about 8:30 at night while tracting. We walked down this road we hadn't been to before and theirs was the first house we came to. We stood outside the gate and called for them. I remember instantly a dog came running out and barked at us. I had the thought to leave because well they won't be able to hear us because the dog will distract them so its pointless. So I turned to walk away, when I felt to stay. I saw a head poke out of their door, so now we're fully commited. After a few seconds of conversation a man walks out. We do the usual, introduce ourselves and ask if we can share a message with them. And whatta ya know, he lets us in! They were eating dinner so we apologized and asked if they wanted us to return some other time, but they said now was good and cleaned everything up. Their name is the Magallone Family, and they have 2 daughters about Ally's age. We taught them about Families and our Heavenly Father, and they were so receptive! Instead of looking at the ground like many of our investi's do they were just eating our words up! The Dad asked a lot of questions. We found out they were "Less-Active Born-Agains" as they put it themselves. We also went back to them tonight, and the same thing! So we are convinced they are the reason we both are here in this area and that they are PURE GOLD! So counting them, we picked up a total of 15 New Investi's this week which is the most I've had so far! And we also tracted an Indian guy who didn't know Tagalog OR English...we couldn't even leave him a pamphlet or anything. After trying to sign-language who we were for like 10 minutes I just stopped, shook his hand, said thanks in Tagalog because it was the only word he knew, and left. You can't win em all I guess. Last Saturday we did a Service Project for one of the members with the ZL's, the Elders in our apartment. We had a good time diggin dirt and moving it with buckets to the back of their house. They live on a hill so we were just leveling things out. I accidentally broke the shaft on one of the shovels, it was a handcarved Filipino special so no biggie, Brother can whip a new one out in like 10 minutes I'm sure. We also had a nice experience of being followed to the Church by a drunk guy who came in and attended a Baptism with us. I couldn't get him to tell me his name haha. Our big Samoan ZL, Elder Tevaga, baby-sat him during the Baptism haha. No idea where he took off to after. Hope everyones doing great back at home. I love you all so much! Shoutout to my little Sister who did work at cheerleading her first football game. And also to Josh who's just a stud. Love you all, miss you guys back in the 5th Ward too!

Elder Akins