feb. 16th

Hello everyone!!!!!
Well new area now, no more GLen Burnie now i'm in Gwynn Oak or woodlawn Md whichever you prefer. All i have to say is this is really such an amazing new area. It was so hard leaving GLen BUrnie but now i just can tell that the Lord really has prepared this place for me to be here and it's so great! I'm so happy to have this new challenge of new area, new comp which feels like i'm still kind of training, and DIstrict Leader so ya right now is a really humbling time for me to really rely on the lord in all that i do. We just got out of my first district meeting and all went well. We have some great ELders in our district who really have the desire to work hard and get out there. We are a pretty young district but we all have the first so that makes it so much more fun. THis area is really fun because it's really close to the mission office and so we are working really closely with President and the office missionaries and it's just a great place to be. Me and my new companion are doing great. He is really shy and his spanish struggles but i'm doing my best to help him get out of the shell and really get into the mission. HIs trainer was a really good elder but never let him do anything so i've been making sure that we are doing a lot of 50 50 work. He's great though, he is very loving and made me dinner the first two nights that i was here and i really do love the kid. He feels like my little brother sometimes but were having fun and doing well.
Well the first 2 days i was here it dumped snow like crazy again and we didn't get a whole lot done so it gave us a lot of time to get to knwo the area and bust out the map and go through the area book. That was much needed because we have a lot of work to do. The last baptism here was in october and the only one for 2009 and that's not good for how strong and amazing the branch is. We went to church on sunday all in spanish and it was so great! I finally felt like i'm a spanish missionary and we just have strong preisthood holders too. THe members feed us like crazy almost every night we are getting fed and they adore us missionaries! It's really cool, the latin people are so loving and i could feel that sunday more than ever. We have members who are so stoked on teaching with us and helping us with rides to church and just all the great things that you hope for on a mission i love it!
This past week we had an experience with a member. HIs name is Hermano MORA huge guy from mexico and he wanted us to give his boss a blessing, so we went over there and did. He told us about his boss and how he's a huge alchoholic and used to have all the money in the world and has lost everything. We went to his house and his house was a mess just trashed and it's the nicest house i've been in i think in my life. IT's probably 4 or 5 of our houses put together. But hermano mora and his boss are was close and a afew months ago hermano mora was telling him about us and about what we do and his boss kind of put it in the back of his mind. THEn last week his boss came to him and said i need help from your missionaries, i'm losing it. So we went over to his house and here is this guy who had everything, business cars, money everything heavy on the THINGS and still was miserable and just drank his life right away. HE has a daughter and is about to lose her too. This man seriously is on edge and we starting teaching him about the gospel! ANd it was such an amazing experience! We just told him that we can start over in life and be forgiven of what we have done. He literally is to the point where he thinks that he has gotten so low that he doesn't see that future ahead and he's only like 45. We were trying so hard just to get him to believe that he could start over and that's the thing that i love with the gospel is that we can start over and the people can have that hope to turn around and get on the path to righteousness. We gave him a blessing and invited him to listen to us more and as we were leaving he told us that he was lookign forward to seeing us again. We are going to go over there this week again and we are excited to help this man out.
We also found 2 brother Enrique and ILREALIANO villalobo. They are both from mexico and the elders had talked with them before once but we were really bold after the first lesson as they knew that it made more sense to them than anything else and we invited them to be baptized on march 20th. We are hoping the we can have them ready by then but they have been baptized before but they know that they also have to change their lives around. THat is the great thing about the gospel that i love so much is that we have that ability to change and to know that whatever we may have been doing that we can turn it around and repent of our sins, rely on the savior and become better. I see it in my own life that i've had the bumps and bruises of life and that the lord loves me and he loves us enough to where we can become better in life. I know that this area has been prepared for me to come here and i am so excited and pumped about the things that are already going on here. They had an investigator with a date but we went over to his house to teach him and he was on the phone with the person that lived there from JAIL! ha so that makes that date change up and we are teachign a lady named Karla who has the desire to be baptized but is living with her boyfriend who is the father of her child and he doesn't want to get married, so there is a lot of work to be done here and also a lot of less active work to be done too! THere is so much we need and have to do and i'm excited that i get to do it.
Thanks for all your support out here and for all you do for me. I really haven't been this happy and excited about the work like i am right now. It's such a challenge coming into a new area and starting over but it's so fun to figure all this out! I love it here and i couldn't ask for anything more. I love you all so much and i hope you have a wonderful week!
Con mucho amor,
Elder Hammer