Happy Easter! #pray4vicente

Happy Easters!

We took Vicente to see the temple!

Hermana Bailey has 1 year in the mission and I have 8 months!

Photo bombed while showing off our "Easter dresses"!

FRIED FISH!!!

I just keep seeing people and/or pictures of people who look like my cousin, Alex.

So this week was Semana Santa. Basically it’s when nobody has school for 15 days and all of the stores shut down, and all of the Catholic people come one to worship. We found out this week that our area is where they all come to celebrate Easter. On Friday that’s the day that NOBODY works and everyone is at church, but all of the members in our ward went swimming for an activity...ha-ha! There is this huge church in our area called Cristo Rey and people from other states come on these huge buses to attend this big conference.  Kind of like our general conference, but a lot smaller. There were a lot of people in white walking in the streets; it was really weird and really intimidating, ha-ha. We just had a normal day, a lot harder to contact people, but it was good. 

This whole week we were prepping our investigators and ourselves for the conference. We had 3 of our investigators there and we were soooo excited for that! The family Foster came to one session and Vicente when to two of them and the priesthood session. He has a baptism date for April10th and he is really, really excited! We are really excited for him; we just have to keep him excited! Please, Please pray for him that he can keep up the faith and not fall into any kind of bad temptation of Satan. The ward is getting pretty excited for the baptism; they have a choir ready and everything! Ha-ha - I’m really excited for this weekend, I’ve just got to keep up my faith that everything will work out good. I have this bad thing in the back of my mind, trying to not get my hopes up all the way, because if something happens and he can’t be baptized this week then it won’t be as bad of a letdown. Something that I learned in the conference this weekend was about the faith. Basically you just have to give all of your faith to the Lord and have full hearted faith that things can and will happen for the good. That little small voice of trying to not get my hopes up is GONE. I learned that I have to get my hopes up for things because that’s giving it all of my faith. If I hold a little bit of it back, then that’s holding it away from the Lord, and that’s just not right. 

We know faith is something that we can’t see but we know is there. We can say we have faith all we want, and that we believe in God and Christ, but then we don’t act on it, and that’s not truly having faith and believing is it? If we truly believe in the power of God, we give him our all. We have faith in his power and his abilities to make our weakness strong. We give him the opportunity to help build us up to who we want to be through our confidence in our faith and our actions. Try your faith and pray. If you truly believe and pray for something you can reach it, only if you give it all you have. I know that this is true because I have seen it. 

Two weeks ago we were prepping Vicente for his baptism. He had a baptism date for the 10th and we just got done talking about tithing with him and about the temple.  He accepted it full heartedly. That night he called us saying that he didn’t want to get baptized, that he didn’t want anything to do with tithing and that he didn’t have the money to pay it. He didn’t want to go to church every Sunday and he was angry because he couldn’t enter the temple, and that he would have to wait a year. It just came out of nowhere and we were both crushed. We thought it was all over with him and then our bishop called us. (He is one of the greatest bishops I have ever had.) We told him what had happened and he asked us, “Do you have the faith that he can still be baptized on the 10th?” We were both a little thrown off by that after we had just explained to him that Vicente said he didn’t want it. We just paused and he said, “I know that he will be baptized on the 10th, and you two have that same faith.”  He told us he was ready to be baptized and that we had practice for the choir the next day for Vicente’s baptism, ha-ha! In that moment I really was lacking faith. I was at the end of my rope with my faith and I just didn’t know how to have it. My bishop really showed me that through faith all things are possible. The next day we went back and talked with Vicente, talked though all of his doubts and 3 days later he wanted to be baptized again. I know that through our faith and acting with faith and believing in your faith you too can receive miracles. Whether it be with work, school, or family, you can receive it. I love you all and hope you all enjoyed the conference as much as I did. I wanted to talk about more of the talks but this letter is already long enough! I am so grateful for eternal families and I can´t wait for the day that I can have my own to live with forever. I love you so much and hope you always remember to have the faith. 

Les Amo,

Hermana Velasquez

#pray4vicente