Francisco and Marta

Hola familia,

This week has been turning out just the way that I wanted it to. I guess I didn't mention that Maria fell of date. She wasn't able to come to church last week. Francisco is still looking good though. And that will be this upcoming Saturday. We still have a few things to take care of to make it all happen. The only big thing left is his interview which is tomorrow with President Jubitz.

I thought you'd like to know, we gave Francisco one of those pair of scriptures that you sent me. We couldn't wait until Saturday. And he's been using them a lot since then so I think it was a good idea. We've been seeing him just about everyday for the last little while. He also hasn't smoked since a few days after we committed him to be baptized! He's been keeping his commitments so well!

Sorry about being late on the Father's day card dad. I think you should've gotten it today. If not, maybe tomorrow. If nothing else, just like I told mom, it just extends the holiday for a few more days.

We didn't really go and pick strawberries this week. We did go on a hike today, which is why we're so late emailing. And there were some wild strawberries along the trail. They were some of the sweetest strawberries I've ever eaten. They were just really small.

The gps that Elder Tracy got was a tomtom XL or something like that. And it works really well. It's one of the better ones that I've seen.

So as you might already know transfers are coming up. Transfer day is on my birthday which is a Wednesday. We'll find out what's going to happen on this next Saturday. I'm pretty sure that I'll stay but we're not sure about Elder Tracy. I think it's possible that he could stay one more.

Since it's also getting towards the end of the month, we're running low on miles so we went biking yesterday. Just for the end of the day. We biked from our house down to our dinner appointment with the Woodlands and then we stopped by Marta's house on the way home. That's all we had time for.

The appointment with Marta went super great. We started asking a lot of questions guided by the spirit and found out that the morning that we knocked on her door she had been praying to find the true church. And surprise, surprise, we showed up. The thing that was cool was she immediately recognized this as her answer. She's beginning to read the Book of Mormon again. And she's going to be coming to church this next week. She's actually been taught before by the sister missionaries. I guess she wasn't ready back then. And now she is! She also has a young guy renting one of her rooms from her. His name is Ruben. While we were riding our bikes to the appointment we ran into him walking home from the store. I recognized him from before and we walked our bikes along with him back to Marta's. It turns out that he actually had a lot of LDS friends where he lived in Mexico, Mexico City. Actually, really close to our temple. He's never talked to missionaries or really been introduced to the church. So we're really excited about him.

I didn't really tell you much about our hike today. It was 15 miles roundtrip. I got tons of cool pictures to send to you. As I mentioned there were lots of strawberries to pick and eat along the way. We met a guy named Brandon afterward that we started talking to. He gave us a little bit of water because we had run out. This was back at the parking lot after the hike. We talked for probably 20 minutes about him and his life and then about missionary work and about Spanish; he went to Mexico for a little bit. It was a cool conversation.

Well I love you family, Elder Ben Arnold