New Assignments!

Congrats to Brandon & Kari on new baby Audrey! They will be a super strong influence in the ward for ever! Hey Mom, I pulled 600 pesos out of my bank account to marry a family last week.

Tomorrow I have transfers. I only served here for two transfer cycles but I feel good about the work my companion and I did the past 12 weeks in this area and with the Elders in the zone. When I came here, there were 9 baptismal dates set. This week there are 50. We also had a very successful Christmas open house at our Stake Center. Missionaries stood on the sidewalk, inviting people to come in. Refreshments were served, and each of the auxiliaries had stations set up where they told people about their organizations. From that activity, we also have MANY new referrals!

Other cool news that I keep forgetting to tell you is that the mission is going to be bigger as of tomorrow. A few weeks ago in the mission council, President told us that the mission is going to receive one stake/zone from the bordering mission Chalco. The new stake is called Ixtapaluca and it is a pretty cool zone of city/mountain and village areas. In the stake there is also a church ranch where they take the young single adults camping. The stake is also known for baptising a lot so they call it "bauptizaluca."

In this transfer, there are a ton of Elders that have changes and President says that he wants to send a lot of the zone leaders and district leaders to this new zone to whitewash it with hard work! They are going to drop a lot of leaders to senior comps in Ixtapaluca and call a lot of new leaders throughout the mission. We are going to white wash an entire stake and the mission is going to have a huge makeover. So tomorrow we will see what happens! I don’t know where they are going to send me but I will let you know next week. 

Elder Shumway