A Long Week

Hello once again to all my friends and family! This week has been quite a different one, and quite a boring one at that haha. I found myself thinking a lot about Joseph Smith and relating to him this week haha.

First off, there is a whole lot of ruckus going on in the capital of Tegucigalpa with the protesting and all that. I guess I don't really need to talk about that because you all can watch the news and find out more than I know haha. But anyways, because of that, the whole mission has been in lock down for quite some time now. Right after my last email, we headed for the house, and stayed without leaving for anything until Wednesday in the afternoon. We barely had any food haha so it was really fun trying to think of things we could eat with the little food that we had. It was also really boring haha, you all know the things that they have in the houses of missionaries. Desk, bed, bathroom, kitchen, closet.....yeah. Luckily we had a soccer ball, and a deck of cards, and other than reading and studying this is what we occupied the remainder of our time doing. Tuesday night it poured rain outside so we played soccer at the side of our house while soaking ourselves, it was quite the time!

Wednesday the government allowed the people to leave their houses from 11 to 4 to get out and buy some food and all that. So we ran to the supermarket, which was incredibly full, bought some food, ran to the bishop's house to have some lunch, ran to our investigator Noè's house to give him a quick lesson, and ran back to the house to stay there all night again. I felt kind of like Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail, because there was just nothing to do. Finally, Thursday we were allowed to leave! Freedom! We worked the whole day of Thursday and Friday and most of the Day Saturday, and the whole day Sunday, and that's about it. We taught as many lessons as we could during this time, but it wasn't very many cause frankly, we are running out of investigators haha, with little time to find more.

On Friday we had a service project in the morning where we deep cleaned parts of the church to prepare it for General Conference, Stake activities, and other things such as this. This is basically the only unique thing that we did this week other than the regular missionary work.

But, despite all of this, we still had the baptism of Noè! Man it was great. We had his interview on Friday, taught him an awesome lesson on the power of the priesthood on Saturday to prepare him to receive it, and his baptism early in the morning Sunday before church. I got to perform the baptism, and it was my first performed baptism of one of my own investigators. Elder Cobo performed the confirmation in Sacrament Meeting. All I can say is that we are incredibly happy for him, and we see great things coming in the future for him (hopefully he can receive a calling to be our Ward Mission Leader!!!!!) I felt really blessed for the opportunity to baptize and teach him.

Well, because of the lock down we didn't have Zone Conference this week, so President Flores couldn't come down to interview Edwin, so we can't baptize him for awhile. In addition to that his work route with the milk truck is being really brutal for him. Taking him clear out to Esperanza, the furthest area out in our mission and its like an hour away from me. They might be moving to Esperanza soon, but I will keep some more information on that later.

That is about all I have for you guys this week, I hope you are all doing well and just know that I am perfectly safe here! I love you all and miss you very much!

Love Elder Tinkham