Sister Madalyn Jones: Batismoooo!!

Hello everyone!! Hope you are all having a great week! We had a really good week this past week! Passed by way too fast!

We had conference on Thursday, which was so good! We learned a lot about making goals, eliminating distractions, waking up (figuratively of course), doing more, and being baptizing missionaries. It was very spiritual and gave me that boost that conferences always give! Then we got to work and applied these things into our work!

On Saturday was the baptism on Joana! It was SO good! Before the baptism, we always warn our friends about the "Law of Opposition" and prepare them for all the bad things that can happen that day to make it hard to get baptized. We prepared her for everything (sharing personal experiences about waking up with the flu and everything), but in the end, it was us as missionaries who faced the opposition!

We started filling up the baptism font at 12 because we knew it took a few hours to get it all full and ready. BUT after it had been filling up for like 30 minutes we went to look at the font, only to find out that a member decided to cut his hair in the font that morning, and not clean it all up. The problem? We found out a little too late. We didn’t have time to drain the font and clean it. The solution? We ran to a cheap Chinese store to find a strainer kitchen tool, and used to go fishing for hair. It was quite the adventure. I wanted to vomit, but hey it had to be done. After the font was basically all clean, we ran to our home, and ran back (which normally would take an hour in total, but we are speedy and it took like 40 minutes) to get the cookies we made for the baptism, and got there right before Joana. In the end, the water didn’t get the hot (still not quite sure why..) but Joana toughed it out and was baptized!

The program ran smoothly and the spirit was very present! It bore testimony that Joana was doing the right thing at the right time. She is already looking forward to when she can go to the temple! Her boyfriend, a member from our ward, baptized her and it all ran perfectly! It was the perfect day! I made cookies and 3 of her friends who aren’t members marked appointments so I can go over to their house and teach them how to make chocolate chip cookies. Its so weird that they don’t have chocolate chip cookies here because they literally go CRAZY for the cookies when we make them. And they are so easy!!!

In other news we found Mexican food today! And a frozen yogurt place, but it was closed. Sad. But the Mexican food was so good! Not anything close to like real Mexican food, but it was good. I am full now.

Other than that, this week has been full of a lot of prayer and a lot of fasting for some of our other investigators. Its good to be a missionary and its good to be in Portugal!

fotos:

1.Batismo de Joana!

2.Sister Baker fishing for hair in the baptism font... gross.

3. Coooookies´

4. Conference this week!