A Super Awesome Valentine's Day!

We spent Friday evening getting the church decorated and
ready for the wedding and baptisms. Here we are having
a little fun afterwards, ha ha.

Getting ready before the wedding, and this is only some of the crowd.

Hey everyone! Well, I'll start with the super awesome news first.... we had the wedding and baptisms last Saturday!!! And the family was all confirmed in church on Sunday!!! Awesome!!! Elder Rodas and I found this family during our second week of this past cambia, and then they were able to all get baptized this last week of the cambia. This family has definitely been one of the highlights of my mission so far. Thank you everyone for the prayers on behalf of this family, and they are all doing really well. It was definitely a love-filled Valentine's Day on Saturday with the wedding! This couple had been together for 20 years, and they have 4 children together, but they hadn't been able to get married until we helped them out, and they are extremely grateful. This next week, we get to teach them about setting a goal to go to the temple and getting sealed together as a family, which they can do one year from now. After the wedding, I was able to baptize two of the family, and Elder Rodas baptized the other two. One good thing was that there was a huge crowd of members and investigators present to watch the wedding and baptisms -- some said it was the biggest crowd they had ever seen at a baptism in Nicaragua, so it was a super awesome Valentine's Day!!

After the wedding, then we had the baptisms.
Such an awesome family!!

Otherwise it was a pretty normal week. We were just incredibly busy planning the wedding. The missionaries take care of quite a bit, including talking to the lawyer, getting the cake, inviting the members to be there, getting two witnesses, filling out lots of paperwork, making copies of IDs and such, but it turned out great and I learned a lot during the process. We are now working to find some new, positive people to start teaching.

This is our District, and these guys helped us with the wedding and baptisms.

Today for P-Day, we had to go back to the Immigration Offices in the morning, but this time for an ID for Elder Rodas. The rest of our P-Day today was pretty relaxed. I forgot all about President's Day back home, because obviously, they don't celebrate that as a holiday here in Nicaragua. There were lots of people and couples walking around on Valentine's Day, so they do celebrate that holiday and it is rather popular here. Random thing, by the way, I have seen a handful of kids wearing Jr. Jazz jerseys down here, and it's kind of funny, LOL.

This hoop is about as ghetto as it gets!

As I mentioned, this next week is cambios and Elder Rodas will likely be transferred as he has been here in Ciudad Sandino for three cambios already, and this is the only area he has served in so far on his mission. BUT, anything is possible, so you never know. The cambios are on Wednesday, and we won't find out the changes until Tuesday evening. Thanks for all the updates from home, everyone. I'm doing great -- I'm feeling much better and not sick any more -- got over the stupid cold. I did miss home a lot this week, don't know why, maybe the stress of the baptisms and wedding or something. Anyways, have a great week everyone!!

(Alex didn't say what was going on here. Let's just hope
with the exciting, busy week they had, that the Spirit of God
like a fire was burning, and then they had to go put it out
before someone called the Fire Department.)