Mason's letter -- May 24, 2010

Hey familia.

Dad that was a crazy story. I was reminded of how the people drive here in this city. We have these things called rapiditos. They are little vans that are really ghetto. Anyways they stuff about 20 or 23 people in them... so we are all sitting on laps and stuff. Imagine a van that seats about 9 or 10 with 20 people in it. And the drivers swerve through traffic and go through red lights and up on the curbs or the grass to pass people. It's so nuts. haaha so yeah i know a little how you feel.

This week was a better one here in San Pedro. It's still a little slow with investigators and stuff but we keep just talking to people and teaching a lot of news people to see if they are any good. So we've found a few great people this week that I'm really excited about. Oh, and we ended up baptizing 2 people this weekend. The one lady that had gone to church for a while and her daughter that had also come to church before. Well they are super poor so I wanted to make sure that they didn't just go to church for food or help... the bishop doesn't like us to preach in the super poor area called the border. But the 2 ladies came looking for us one day after church and really wanted us to come to their house to teach them. So we went down there and taught them and they wanted to get baptized. So I set the date for Saturday. They are super poor and don't even know how to read, but they did have a sincere desire to be a part of the church and follow Jesus Christ. So that was a blessing. Hopefully we broke the ice of the baptisms here and now they will come rolling in.

But we did find a really cool guy this week named Mauricio. He lives right in front of the church, but by chance we just contacted him in another part of the city. His little daughter had been wanting to go to church for a while, and he was really interested. His wife and him have alot of marriage problems and he's always a little depressed about it. But luckily right now in the church they are doing a marriage class every week. So I hope we can get him to go to that. But anyways we had been talking to him and he told us he generally doesn't like churches because the first thing they always talk about is tithing. He said that all the churches are just in it for the money. But we explained tithing to him and he seemed to like the way we do it in the church. So we brought him to church and sat down and the first speaker got up and said, Well now I will talk about a subject found in Malachi 3... oh no, i thought not tithing..... and yes he spoke on tithing. I just looked at my companion in disbelief and prayed really hard that he would say the right words and nothing crazy. But after the meeting Mauricio didn't say anything, He just said he liked it and he wants to come next week too. So that was a little scary. I'm glad it didn't scare him off, but I thought God knows what he's doing so it must all work out.

It rained a few times this week. turns out my house isn't perfect. It leaks a lot. Water was running down all along the walls like a waterfall... so it got a lot of stuff wet. All my books got wet. I spent one morning ironing my books page by page haha. but the landlord finally got it fixed this week so it's all good now.

But, this week was a lot better. I feel more comfortable and confident in the Lord that we will find the chosen ones here.

I love you all so much. thanks for all the support and letters.

Love Elder MasonCardon