Dec.3rd, 2018 Letter #56

Viridiana didn't make it to church, but had an excuse that's reasonable for now seeing as we need to teach her more about the doctrine of the Sabbath Day. Her kids all made it though. If the two of them get baptized it would indeed be right before the next change. Chucho's mom is pretty much cool with us now, but his dad is still a ways away. 

Elder Pearl was changed and Elder Gutierrez arrived in his place as zone leader. He and Hermana Aristega are the new missionaries in my district. Everyone else is the same. I know both of them fairly well and neither one is hard to get along with. 

I wasn't given time to teach a district class this week due to the fact that we took 19 years to have every missionary in the zone present him or herself the day of the classes, and there won't be classes this week or the next due to the zone class (where the zone leaders will talk about what they learned in the leadership council of the mission) and zone conference the week after. 

I don't know what's happening on the 23rd, they haven't said anything in church. 

When we play games on p-day we usually get together in the church and most of the time somebody has a game so they bring it. There's a Mexican-Cuban museum here somewhere. 

I did get to see the Christmas Devotional. I liked the music a lot. Something I started this morning that I'll continue for a few days is that I'm dissecting Mosiah 3:19 and studying each thing mentioned in the verse in order to essentially find how I can more fully "put off the natural man." 

One challenge in this week was that Elder Gutierrez got sick and couldn't work so Elder Jimenez and I put ourselves in charge of the investigators of the Zone Leaders as well as our own. We were able to maintain the investigators in place, but we found only 2 new people in our own area and didn't have time to visit them again so we went from a stellar week last week to a horrible week of results this time around and that kind of hurt my pride haha. But I'm just going to brush it off and work hard this week. The Zone Leaders should be able to work this time around and I think we'll get things turned around. 

This week I probably had the funniest/most embarrassing moment of my mission so far, but you'll have to ask me about it when I get back so that I can explain it better. (*He guarantees he will remember it but I am still going to ask him when we Skype at Christmas.)

One tender mercy this week was that the other two areas in my district had some miracles happen and have a number of baptisms coming up so we're seeing things move in the right direction with them. One thing I really like about Tuxpan is that it's big enough to have some cool things, but it's not too much.

Love,

Elder Finlinson

 Baptism of Elvira

 Baptism of Gael and Ariana by their cousin Miguel

Baptism of Karla

Check it. This showed up in the announcements of the mission that only the missionaries see. We took this picture a few weeks ago and ever since then I've been known as Joseph Smith in the zone.