1/13/20: A personal thank you to David Archuleta

 buenas tardes hermanas y hermanos

This week was pretty awesome as usual! Jessica was finally baptized and it was the greatest event to hit Los Banos!! Wow it has been amazing watching the gospel seep into her life and just change everything! She worked so hard to get ready for baptism and made so many changes! She was so excited and we were excited for her! Her brother (who also joined the church a few months ago) drove over from Las Vegas to surprise her too! it was awesome!!! Jessica is just the best and I could actually talk about her forever buuuuuut i dont have a lot of time so onto another highlight

We started teaching this couple that kinda sorta lives at the same Motel as Gabriel! Gabriel and his parents have been talking to them about church and they were interested and asked to meet with us! Tiger and Georgina are super nice but we can only have lessons at night... outside... and the motel has some interesting characters around it. Some of which will actually sit in and listen to our lessons! After one of the lessons I said a prayer to end the and just felt like I should pray for everyone that was there with us whether we were directly teaching them or not and after I said Amen i opened my eyes and saw this lady that had been watching us just coming at me from the shadows arms open... it kinda freaked me out but she just grabbed me and gave me a big ol hug! and then she just started sobbing and sobbing and wouldmt stop hugging me and it was really sad because she said she had just learned her dad had passed but we gave her our number and talked about how her dad is actually ok and how she will see him again. Kind of an interesting situation but I think we were able to bring her some peace.

We also met a sweet very old little mexican lady who joined the church apparently when she was very young but does not remember it... but she does remember DAVID ARCHULETA!! she went on and on about how much she loved him and his voz de un angel and when we showed her the new church youth theme music album... which has a song by him on it... she actaully started crying tears of joy. We set her up with more of his music and wow she was just so happy haha!! super cute!

we are still hopping along and Hermana Browns foot is almost better! kinda! almost off the crutches! Hands on Radeyon must be working. 

I am kinda nervous about taking the area but I am working really hard to make little triumphs each day. I got a wonderful piece of council on sunday from Hermana Mackay, the mission presidents wife, (The president and Her came to speak in the Spanish group and english ward on sunday) She said we should focus on building up confidence through working on further developing our strengths. 90% of what we do is normally pretty good we just always tend to focus on the bad and make it over shadow the good. If we build our confidence up in our strengths than we will feel and be strong enough to tackle our weaknesses one at a time! That thought really helped me! I am making progress! especially in Spanish! I cant understand everything but I am starting to connect with people in little ways! I am learning to rejoice in my progress and use that joy to motivate me to continue progressing!

Love you all

Hermana Allen

Photos

 getting the cat

still getting the cat

I have the cat 

Jessica's baptism she is so cuuuute

cotijas...  el taqueria mejor