Hey From Texas!

August 19, 2013

Elder Gallegos and Calvin at the MTC(Elder Gallegos is from Texas, the mission Calvin is going to)

Hey from Texas!   This week has been awesome. I am so excited to finally be in the mission field.
I love it here! It has been a very busy week and a very productive week as well. The people here are great. We have a small branch(small church group) that has around 200 people, but only around 20 show up on Sundays. Last week there were around 48 and this week there were only 29. We are working hard to make this small branch into a ward( a geographic area). We have around 16 investigators.  Some are part member families. Yesterday we had a devotional and in our zone(missionaries serving in a geographical area) we had 7 investigators at it, 5 of which were ours. We had some of the recent converts speak and share about how they came to know the church was true, it was really great! And on the way up to Bay City (it was about a 30 min drive) I taught the ten commandments to 5 kids that are investigating the church it was awesome. We rode in a limo so all the kids were excited to be there. In our area, we have a senior couple named Brother and sister Funk they drive a limo and take us places. 

Brother and Sister Funk and Calvin at the temple

Sometimes with investigators its pretty awesome. I went on exchanges(local members help out with rides and go on visits with the missionaries). The other day  a cool thing happened. It is so neat to see the Lord's hand in His work. We had just finished a lesson and we still had 10 minutes so we started walking the the next complex we got there and the gate was locked so we started walking back and a man was walking towards us. I said hi and asked how he was doing and he said just fine and told us the missionaries use to teach him and he wanted us to start teaching him again. We set up an appointment. We didn't have a prompting to walk a certain way or anything we were just trying to go visit someone else and ran into a man that wanted to have the discussions again it was perfect. And another story happened 2 days ago, we had been going from appointment to appointment with no luck. No one was home.  So we decided to go see a lady in a different apartment complex and when we drove up we saw a lady trying to take a tv out of her car. It wasn't a big tv, but we stopped her and asked if we could help.She let us carry it in for her and she invited us in. She then started telling us her life story. She liked to talk a lot but she has lived through 6 car wrecks where she rolled her car in all of them and lived through cancer, and open heart surgery. She doesn't have any kids or any family left and is a super strong christian lady. She saw a lady about 6 months ago that didn't look too good and decided to bring her home with her. It turns out the lady that she took in has like 4 types of cancer and she has been taking care of her and taking her to chemo and taking care of this stranger out of pocket she is SO nice and wanted us to come back to teach this next week because of how nice we were. She also isn't afraid of dying because of everything she has gone through. And she was super happy and told us we didn't even know what was in store for in the next life she said it was going to be awesome she says she is alive still so she can help the lady with cancer but I think we were put into her life at just the right time I am so excited to teach her next week! We also have about 3 or 4 weddings we are trying to set up and plan before some of our investigators can get baptized. We got 5 baptismal dates from a  family which is exciting. There is plenty of work here for us to do trying to build up the branch and get more less actives to come back. I am so excited to be here and teach the people here in Texas. Even though it has been over 100 degrees and super humid everyday, it dosen't matter. The awesome people here are making up for it.  

Elder Sabando, Elder Howell, and Calvin in front of the Houston temple