This week was a good week! We ended it with the first baptism in Townsville in two years! The person who got baptized was Sarah Drabsch! She has a really strong testimony and is going to be a really strong member in the church! She is a former Jehovah's Witness and she knows that the J-dubs are wrong and that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the only church that has the fullness of truth on the earth today. The spirit was really strong at the baptism and you could tell that she was really committed and ready to get closer to God and Jesus Christ. She said the reason she knew it was true was because you could feel that it was true in her heart, and that it is the only church she has ever been too where she feels close to God and Jesus Christ. She has a strong testimony and she is definitely going to be a strong member. I just really want her to stay active. Most of the people I baptized in Raceview have now gone less active, so here I am going to make sure that the people have a strong testimony before they are baptized and make sure that there is a lot of fellowship, so they have reasons to keep coming to church. The Townsville branch has done a really good job fellowshipping Sarah and making her feel welcome which is good. I can tell everything is going to be good with her. Sarah's Daughter Anna has also been influenced by the church. When I first started going to Sarah's to teach her Anna would just go to the other room and ignore us. After Anna went to the Baptism of Sarah and felt the spirit, she has started really liking the church. She started talking to us. She is starting to come to church. And she came to the fellowship potluck we have at our branch presidents house every week. She likes our church more because no one is pushing her to do anything like they did in the Jehovah's Witness church, so we are going to take time with her and let her feel comfortable with everything before we commit her to baptism. But everything is going well with them. I am hoping to be able to baptize her sometime in the next 6 months while I am here, but we will see. It feels so good to have a baptism here. The branch had all of a sudden become more supportive of the missionaries and helping us out a lot more because they can see that we are actually doing work and not just sleeping all day like the last missionaries did.
As you can see with the pictures I sent we had to fill up the font with a fire hose and we had to empty it out with buckets. Funny story. We went to the baptismal font on Friday night to make sure everything was working well and it was really dirty because of the lack of baptisms so we cleaned it out and we thought everything would run smoothly the next morning when we went to fill it up. But everything that could go wrong with the font went wrong. The tap in the font was only at a trickle because the pump that put the water in was broken, so as a result of that we had to get the emergency fire hose and fill up the font with that. We got changed and got everything ready with 5 minutes to spare before the baptism starting at 10 o clock after getting to the chapel at 7 that morning. Then after the baptism we went to go drain the font and found another problem. Since the drain in the font is below ground level and the chapel is really old. They have to have a pump that will pump the water out of the font and drain in outside. So another thing went wrong, and the pump that did that was also broken, so we we had to empty the font out with buckets. One of us would stand it the water. Dip the bucket in. Had the bucket to the other person and then they would pour the water out the window. It took quite a while to do that. But it got done and everything was OK. They are going to fix it sometime soon, so the next baptism wont be so complicated. So it will make a great story to tell. Not many people can say that they had to fill the baptismal font with a fire hose and then empty the water out with buckets. We had fun with it and it was a good time!
We only have one progressing investigator now. His name is Qayyum and he is going to be getting baptized in January. He is amazing and has a really strong testimony. We also have a lot of really good potential investigators. So we are going to be working hard this week to find more people and make some of the potential investigators progressing. I love Townsville and everything about it. Its a harder area, but everything about it is wonderful. I hope you all have a great week!
Love
Elder Kyler Powelson
