Another Week is GONE

Hello family,

We had a really great week this week! The reason I say it was great is
because we are having a baptism this Saturday!! It's for a kid named
Amado. We have this part member family we are teaching, the nicest
family ever, the mom has been a member for a while and a couple of
months ago before I came to the area her younger son who is 10 got
baptized but Amado who is 12 didn't want to, he has had many baptismal
dates but non of them happened for reasons unknown, anyways this
Tuesday we went over to visit the Pocasangre family and we decided
that we were gonna read a few chapter from the children's Book of
Mormon with them, after we read that we just had a strong feeling to
invite him to be baptized, he has been invited so many times and has
been talked to about baptism so many times, but this time it was
different, so we invited him and he paused and said "yes I would like
to get baptized" it was an awesome experience and we could just see
how happy Yovanni (his little brother who's 10) got, his face lit up
and he had the biggest smile, he has always wanted Amado to get
baptized and has been a really good example to him.

Jeyuri our other person with a baptismal date still is doing really
good, he is getting to know more and more members and he's liking
church more and more and yesterday we actually took him out to go to a
FHE at a members house, we had a good spiritual experience.

So we had a mission tour this weekend with Elder Gong from the 70 and
MAN was it good, on Sunday we all went down to the Temple on 66th
street to have a devotional and the topic was "Always remember him" to
prepare we studied elder gongs talk from a recent general conference
and elder Nelson talk on the sabbath day, the devotion was really
awesome and we all got to meet elder gong and shake his hand and talk
to him a bit, it was a cool experience, the next day we had a zone
conference with just the Bronx zones, so the Olmstead and Kingsbridge
zones, elder gong only wanted to meet with the Bronx zones for a zone
conference so we felt pretty special jaja.

Overall it was a really good week and we learned a lot by the Spirit
of the Lord.

Love,

Elder Pugmire

🏙🏜

Hey everybody 👋 how is everything going? I hope that everybody is
doing good. We had a good week ourselves, to start out we I wanna talk
about a baptism that happened this weekend, it wasn't our investigator
but it was the sister in our district but it wasn't always like that,
the lady who got baptized her name is Virginia and when I got here to
this area about 8 weeks ago we were actually teaching her and after
our first appointment she decided that she no longer wanted to be
taught so she completely dropped us but the sisters were still working
with her kids and one day they just decided to talk to Virginia again
and a couple of weeks later she was baptized, I could not believe it
because in just a couple of short weeks she changed completely, the
reason I can tell that she changed a lot is because a few days before
she got baptized she asked the sisters if we could give her a blessing
and we were able to go to her house and talk to her again and she was
a completely different, before she was super depressed and she told us
how she has all these problems and how she can never be happy because
she has too many trial but this time she was smiling she was really
excited and super happy, she told us that even though she still has a
lot of problems in her life she now is really happy and wants to share
this happiness with everybody, it was kinda cool because after her
baptism when she was sharing her testimony she expressed how she wants
to be a missionary so that everybody can feel the happiness that she
feels now. It was really cool to see how the gospel of Jesus Christ
changed Virginia and how it can change anybody if they let it change
them. On Sunday she was confirmed and she wanted me and elder
santibanez to be in the circle and that was a cool experience as well,
also on Sunday we had meeting with the bishop before church and so we
had to be there at 8 so we were rushing trying to get ready and be
there in time because we have 4 elders in the apartment and only 1
shower but anyways we got ready we left made it on time to the meting
and as soon as we walk into the bishops office I realized I didnt have
a name tag haha so likely elder santibanez had 2 name tags on him so I
was wearing one of his, not a lot of people noticed but the ones that
did were a little bit confused. We also had 5 investigators at church
so that was good, only one of them is progressing because the others
just come to church but don't do anything else like read or pray, but
it's still way good that they are there. Another thing that made this
week a good one is because for the last couple of days the weather has
been perfect, the average was probably high 50s in the last couple of
days and it felt really weird to not be cold when we are walking
outside.

Ok have a good week!
Love,
Elder Pugmire🙂

Snapshot in Hunts Point

Hello everybody,

So this week has been pretty fun. We started out the week with a
family home evening with the sister missionaries and we visited this
one recent convert with her 3 kids, the reason we were with the sister
missionaries is because this recent convert lives in Hunts Point and
the sun was already down and the sister can't go into hunts point
after dark so we had to like escort them and stuff, I didn't really
like doing the escorting part of the FHE but the actual FHE was really
fun and the family that we visited is really cool. It was my first
time that we did that this past cycle, apparently the missionaries
have been doing this every week before I got here.

So on Tuesday we had a lesson with Harold our most progressing
investigator, we had a lesson on the law of chastity with him and at
the end of the lesson we invited him to live the law of chastity and
he just straight up said "no I cannot live this law, I will live any
other law except for this one" even after clarifying all the blessing
that he could relieve form this law he still said no.... oh well at
least he is honest about it. So we decided to cut down on the visits
with him and only visit him one time a week instead of 2, hopefully in
the future he decides to change.

We were going through area book and calling random people to see if we
can get somebody to answer the phone, after making a lot of calls only
one person answer and she told us that we could stop by, so the next
day we went over and it's this one lady with her son and her
boyfriend, this lady was contacted about a year ago in Manhattan and
some missionaries helped her find Victoria's Secret and she really
liked them but lost contact with them after a while, so she was just
sitting in the area book. So we went over to their house and we taught
them the restoration, the wife really liked it mainly because she
didn't know too much about Christ or anything that happened to him so
pretty much everything we talked about was completely new to her, the
husband was less interested because he has always grown up with the
church and is catholic I think but he expressed some interest, so they
are pretty cool, we actually, had to pass them off to the English
elder because they preferred to speak English so hopefully everything
goes well with them.

We also started to teach this one kid named Jeyuri he is only 12 but
he is way awesome, he is a son of the sisters investigator, for some
reason the sister have been teaching Nani the mom but never taught the
kid so we hopped on it, so far we taught him just the restoration and
he accepted to be baptized when he knows that the church is true, so
next time we meet with him we will set a date. We were also able to
take him to a devotional yesterday in Manhattan, it was really good,
the person who spoke was Stephanie Nielsen and her husband, they are
the people who got into a really bad plane crash and got injured
really bad, both of them shared their stories and their experiences,
it was a really cool devotional, I think elder Holland talked about
her in one of the conferences.

We also had a snow storm this week, I forgot what day it was on but
the wind was blowing like crazy, I think it was like 30 mph or
something like that and there was snow everywhere and it was blowing
around, that day was really freezing but after that day thing went
back to normal, a couple days after the storm there was a lot of slush
on the ground and by now we hardly have any snow or slush on the
ground it all pretty much dried up.

4

Hello family I hope everybody is doing well, I don't have a lot of
time left to email but Saturday we had transfer calls and me and elder
Santi are staying together here in hunts point. I've really enjoyed
this past cycle and enjoyed working with elder santibanez, hopefully
this next cycle is just as good if not better.

Love,
Elder Pugmire