6 months

Hey everyone,Well, tomorrow I complete 6 months in the mission and I honestly can´t believe that much time has gone by. It´s even weirder to think that some fellow missionary friends will soon be home! I still remember the first farewell, ha ha, unfortunately I won´t be there for anyone´s homecoming, considering they sent me way later than everyone else….however, I expect you all to be at mine. No excuse. :D Unless you´re married, then you´re excused….well, actually you can bring your spouse, but if you have children, then you don´t have to. Ha ha, I hope everything is going well up there and that you´re grabbing hold to the things that really matter. Now, more than ever, is the time to do all the things God and His prophets have asked of us. Pachuca is as windy, hot, cold (yes, both of them), dusty, as ever and this week was not the greatest for finding new…but it was good in terms of making sure that the investigators on date for this week and the following stay strong. This week we have been focusing on a man named, Alejandro. He was a referral of a crazy Sister from one of our wards and it turns out that he met the church in the United States and was almost going to be baptized but he had to come back here because something happened with his family. Also, a crazy part of the story is that one of the Sister missionaries that taught him was also going to be baptized because (I think) her records were lost or something. I don´t know, anywho….now we are teaching him and when we found him the first time he was reading………..the Book of Mormon! We were pretty excited and when we asked him if God had given him a response, he said that he had and that he felt he should continue listening to us and he accepted his date for baptism. The only problem is that he has three problems :D…..….football (soccer). He is pretty good and plays in one of the minor leagues here and the games are almost always on Sundays exactly when church starts. It took a long time to get him to be able to come, but he did and is on date for this next week. Another is that his brothers aren´t supportive at all (kind of like Laman and Lemuel, so we´ve been teaching him a lot about Nephi) and he is pretty timid. The last is that we´re not sure about his wife, and what´s the deal with her. Since he literally only has 30 minutes….2-4 days a week we don´t have much time for more than just the lesson and commitments. The other people we are focusing on is the family of a recently departed missionary. It helps a lot that he is serving a mission because, naturally, they now have more interest in the church and even though they are simple people, they believe that what he is doing is right. The issue here is that his mom has cancer and often feels pretty bad. The dad works 24 hours every other day and so one Sunday he can go, and one Sunday he can´t. We know, however, that thanks to their son….they will come to be an eternal family. Well, I don´t have much time left so I´ll cut it off here. Once again, I hope that all is well and I hope that this week can also be a good one. Thanks for all of your support and your emails/letters. Keep em´coming! Until next week!

Elder Dan Israel Lopez