I am ready to make the 2nd half even better than the first!

So our baptizee didn't disappear but he needed another week to work on stopping smoking.  He has been working on it for a while but couldn't quite kick it completely and postponing the baptism I think is helping him take that last step and realize that he really does have to stop smoking completely. He still really wants to get baptized and is doing much better and on track for this Saturday. So at least we don't have to take the font back this week! We should be able to keep it for a while, I think the mission has quite a few and in our zone only 2 of the 4 cities need a portable font and we have two portable fonts in the zone right now so unless one of the other zones has a need for a lot of fonts we should be fine!

In general things are going pretty well, it was even hotter this week than it was last week and so the streets are pretty dead, not to many people really go out so we have to stick to the parks and areas that have more shade if we want to find people. We have some pretty cool people we are working with and a couple of them have dates for baptism! This week we have started teaching this one family we tracted into, the grandmother is pretty religious, and they are a bit poor so there are a lot of them living there, but she really likes what we have taught so far and is really active in getting her family involved in the lessons with us.  Last night we taught her and a couple of her kids (and their wife/ husband) and also a few of her grandchildren, as we would teach she would always make sure that they would understand what we had said and have them explain verses that we had read to make sure that they understood. She also loves the Book of Mormon and she understands it really well, I've only had one other investigator who has had such a good grasp of the Book of Mormon (and he had been reading it for 15 years!), she told us she didn't really understand it at first but as she kept reading and she was able to understand more and more! She was sharing all of the things she learned and liked and comparing it to what she knew from the bible! It was pretty incredible and her whole family is pretty awesome! So I feel pretty blessed to be able to work with them!

I feel pretty good about the language I occasionally do dream in it, it just feels normal to talk with people now, which is good. 

 

Luckily the heat here is more of the dry heat,  I'm not a huge fan of humidity, but it's not as dry as Utah. We have transfers in a couple weeks I'm pretty sure, the beginning of July sometime. Here in Blagoevgrad it is very green, there are a lot of trees - I would say it's like a mixture of Oregon and Victor, plus mountains.

The Branch is doing well we had a branch activity on sat. and it went well and our investigators got to know the members better and vice-versa and it was fun! But yeah things are going well and I'm glad to be here, although it's weird to think that I have less time left than I have been on a mission, kind of sad, but it is good because I feel like I can actually do the work and speak the language now so I am ready to make the 2nd half even better than the first!

Love

Elder Maxwell