February 19, 2011

Dear Family,
This week has been pretty crazy :) We had 6 new missionaries come and everything went really well. It´s been amazing for me to see how many good missionaries have been coming to this mission. This group has a lot of future leaders in it. Most of them had already been leaders in the church at home. One was an Elders quorum president for a year before coming here to the mission. That surprised me a lot. I´m excited to see there progress!!!
On Wednesday we had the last zone conference here in Quito. We had a ton of people there. Because of the changes, we had to invite a lot of missionaries from their new zones because they hadn´t been to a zone conference yet. There were 50 missionaries at the conference. That´s 1/4 of the mission!!! It was a really good conference too.
On Thursday we got to go help another zone with baptismal interviews. They´re supposed to have 15 baptisms today!!! I had a really amazing experience in one of the interviews that really strengthened my testimony. During the interview, the only doubt or problem that she had was about President Monson being a prophet of God. When I first found out I kind of let it aside and kept going through the interview questions because I thought that there might be something else. When I finished all of the questions I asked her if she wanted to be baptized. She told me yes, but she wants to know if President Monson is a prophet first. I asked her how she could know that he´s a prophet. She answered by saying that she had to pray. I told her ok then lets kneel down and you can ask Heavenly Father if Pres. Monson is a prophet of God. We knelt down and she said the prayer. I was praying in my heart that she would recognize the spirit during her prayer. Towards the end of the prayer she began to stutter a little bit and she ended saying amen. She sat down and was looking down into her lap crying. The first thing she said was, "I can´t believe that He would answer me so fast. I feel exactly how I felt when I prayed about Joseph Smith." It was such a special experience for me. Heavenly Father answered both of our prayers. After she told me about what she felt she told me that she has to get baptized on Saturday. I am so grateful that I was able to have that experience. It strengthened my testimony of President Monson and of prayer. He will always help his children when they sincerely ask for it.
Well, this week I´ve been working hard on leaving everything ready and prepared for my replacement. He´ll have to learn everything in 4 weeks because my companion is ending his mission then. It´s kind of weird to think that I won´t be here in a week and a half. I´m excited to go back to the field again. It´ll be fun to get back to the real work :)
Well I love you all. Thank you for all that you do. I´m grateful for each of you.






Love,
Élder Hakes