Week 15 - Surprise! Carlitos is Getting Baptized!

¡Hola!

I am glad to hear that all is well and that everyone had a great conference weekend. And glad that you are going to start "ponderizing" the scriptures. :) I was thinking as he was giving that talk, "If we had started doing that a long time ago it would have been so easy to memorize scriptures and to actually think about the word of God throughout the day." So that is so great that you are going to do that. I would start too, but I still have so much that I am working on memorizing. Our mission president has asked all of us that we memorize all the points in the 3 main lessons in preach my gospel. I started and finished the first lesson this week, so I still have 2 more to go, but we have a scripture of the month that we always try to memorize as well. This past month it was Jacob 1:19.

So to start off... this week was awesome because Carlitos (Carlos) was baptized!!!! It was such a crazy and amazing week. We were basically running all over los Mochis to try and teach Carlos the necessary lessons to be baptized. So basically it was a really fast run through of all the commandments. It was really funny because in one of our first lessons with him we were like "Carlos, we are going to leave you with these five pamphlets, try to read them ALL by tomorrow before we see you, but you probably won't be able to read them at home because your parents will know what is up if you have all of the missionary pamphlets with you." (He wanted his baptism to be a surprise for his parents.) But it all ended up working out. We were able to teach all the lessons and it was super easy because he already knew this was the right path for him, so we got him all ready for his interview with the zone leaders. 

The day of the baptism was crazy. So we had a lot of time before the baptism because we were going to have it at like 7:30 at night because that was when his dad would be back from work. So we got to the church at like 10 to start filling the font. Then like 3 minutes after we started filling the font we realized that the water that had been sitting in the pipes for a few weeks smelled terrible. It smelled so bad it started to stink up the baptismal room. So then to counter act the smell, we poured in soap used to mop the floor, so that seemed to mask the smell of the water to a nice lemon smell. :)

Then at night, we went to the church to get ready for the baptism and when we got there, we found that Lolita (Carlos´s mom) was cleaning the church. So we had to distract her so that her son could sneak into the church without being seen by his mom. So luckily we got Carlos in the building without being seen. He then got changed into all of his white clothing and waited for almost a half hour for his dad to arrive. Then when his parents were sitting down, (We were glad that they were sitting down because we thought that hermana Lolita would faint) we asked them if they would like to meet "Antonio" (the fake name we had to make up because his dad is on the ward council). They both said, "yes" and when they turned around there was their son Carlitos standing there all dressed in white. It was kind of fun because they both had to do a double take and then they both just said ¡¿¡Qué!?! They were both so happy! Hermana Lolita was just in tears and she went and embraced her son and Carlitos was in tears with the reaction of his mom. It was so beautiful, I almost started crying to see how happy their family was.

Lolita then told us how she is so grateful for our Padre Celestial (Heavenly Father) and how he answers our prayers. She later told us that when she went to the temple with the ward she put a bunch of peoples names on the prayer roll, but for her son Carlos, She put his name down like 20 different times on different pieces of paper. It was also awesome to hear the testimony of Carlitos' father, Carlos, and how he was so grateful. We then asked him if he was ready to get wet and he got a big smile when he learned that we had brought clothes for him to baptize his son. It was such an awesome experience. So many of their friends were crying  and were so happy when they walked through the door to discover that "Antonio" was actually Carlitos. It was really cool too because their family is like the heart and soul of this ward and to see their son be baptized was just truly amazing in a way that words cannot even describe. And now in a year they can go to the temple and be sealed together as a family for time and all eternity one of the greatest blessings that our Father in Heaven has given us. 

And yah, on top of all that, it was conference weekend so we all got to watch conference!! Thankfully, I watched it in English. All of the churches have smart TVs now, so we were able to watch conference on the mormon channel. It was pretty cool, we had a room that was full of American missionaries. 

I love you all so much and thank you for all the letters and pictures that you send me. 

Love, Elder Snyder

Carlitos and his parents

The outside of Our Apartment