Goal!!!

Helooooooo,

Once again, we have had a great week in Redwood City. It has been well into the 90's and hot. The work has been about the same. This week we've really been concentrating on contacting everyone. We're running out of supplies from all the contacting we've been doing. As the week has progressed, we've gotten bolder and bolder. One of the things I have begun to apply in my street contacting is extending the baptismal invitation on the street. Amazingly, it's not a bad contacting technique. It's yielded a few appointments and some church attendance. Five months ago, I would have never tried to invite somebody to be baptized after meeting them thirty seconds before. I realized that once I began trying this, a lot of the fear I have had about talking to people on the street has evaporated. I try to talk to everyone. As I get better at talking to people I begin to notice little clues that help to strike up conversation. Things like soccer jerseys, mops on balconies, imagen, and all sorts of things have made it a lot easier to identify clues about everything from religion, work, kids, and school.

At times these clues have been deceptive. One mistake I made this week was contacting a Filipino man in Spanish. He was wearing a jersey from a Mexican soccer team and looked like he was rushing home to watch the world cup. Turns out he spoke Tagalog and a little English, but absolutely no Spanish. My greeting was lost on him. Anyway, we still contacted him in English and referred him onto the English elders.

Speaking of the World Cup, we're a little afraid what that will do to our work. Already, we find people sitting in their front yards with their TVs watching the latest game from their team. It may make this week very hard because we'll be contending with the largest religion in Latin America, outside of Catholocism, futbol!

With our added emphasis on contacting, we've still managed to baptize this week. Gloria Castro was baptized on Saturday. It was a very nice service. Our recent convert Dina shared her testimony and we had several members comment that the spirit was strong. Gloria had been preparing for along time. She began attending church back in March when we first arrived in the area and hasn't missed a week since. She loves the emphasis that the church puts on the family. She also likes that she can really feel the spirit without any excessive show ore pretenses.

I hope all is well back home.

Love,

Christopher Badger