November 16, 2016

Dear Family and Friends!

Another week! And its been a pretty crazy one too! Transfers are tomorrow and you'll never guess what is happening! IM STAYING! Hurray! But the sad news is, Elder Webber is leaving... Its super weird why that's the case because Elder Webber has been here less time than I have and we've only been together for one transfer! Pretty crazy stuff but oh well! So my new companion's name is Elder Clark. Hes been out a couple transfers less than me but I've heard he is pretty cool so Im excited about that! Other than that its been a pretty standard week of finding and teaching! :)

We started teaching another family this week, one that we are really excited about! They live in this apartment complex right near a different family we are teaching! They told us that they want to get back into church and they seem pretty interested in trying ours out! This week we also got a referral from the Sisters missionaries in our ward and it was right in that same apartment complex. The referral ended up being a member moving here from the DC area! We talked to them for a while and they are super awesome! They are recent converts and they have super solid testimonies! We are going to be visiting them again this week so that will be really fun!

We were also able to teach Kaleb again! He is the 9 year old who is going to get baptized soon! We had dinner with the family on Monday night and we set a baptism date for November 27!! We are going to have another baptism! YAY! We are pretty stoked about it! 

Lots of other awesome missionary stuff happened this week, but thats mostly all the important stuff! I love all of you very much and I am super grateful for all of the support and prayers! Have a great week!

Elder Barazoto

November 7, 2016

What an awesome week! We saw some great miracles and they just keep coming! Its amazing to see how much the Lord is blessing us as we pray and work hard!! So probably the highlight of this week was church on Sunday. So the McCord family, the family that I asked everyone to pray for this week came to church! It was amazing!! Thank you for all the prayers because it worked!! It made me so happy because we visited them on Saturday night and invited them to come and the mom told us that she would be there, but the rest of the family would most likely stay home. We were bummed about that, but when Sunday morning came around, the whole family came! It was a miracle!! I was on top of the world all day that day :) hopefully this week we will be able to commit them to a solid baptismal date! Its going to be way awesome!

This week we also had MLC and zone meeting. It was Elder Webbers first experience for both but it went pretty well! He did great! Its always a lot of fun doing those, the missionaries in our zone are really awesome and it makes the meeting super spiritual!

We also had another opportunity to find another family to teach this week. It was later in the evening one night and Elder Webber and I were trying to figure out what we could do to end the day on an awesome note. We decided to pray for an opportunity and we both felt prompted to go to a specific apartment complex in our area. We had found a potential there last week and we decided to see if he was home and was! And what made it even better was his family was there too! The father said that he got a phone call a few minutes before we came with some bad news and us coming helped him to see that God sent us to him for a purpose! It was really awesome!

Well that's mostly it for this week! Everything is going really great here in Clarksburg, we are finding lots of people to teach and seeing so many miracles! It is such a joy to serve as a missionary, I love it so much! Have a great week everyone! Love you all!

Elder Barazoto

PS I took pictures this week but I forgot my camera at the apartment... So Ill send double pictures next week! :)

October 31, 2016

Hello everyone! What a fun week! We had lots of success and we hopefully will be having a baptism soon! Elder Webber and I have been working a lot lately with a family that we found a couple weeks ago. We brought our ward mission leader out with us to go visit them and it went really well! It is amazing to see how local members can brake down barriers with people and help investigators to progress! This family we are teaching has 6 kids and they seem really interested and promising! I am super excited to continue to work with them and see how everything turns out! I can definitely see them getting baptized which would be AMAZING! Their names are the Mccords, please pray from them! :)

This week we also did our exchanges with the assistants. It was awesome because I was with a missionary who I came out with! His name is Elder Kidd! We have had a lot of interaction throughout our missions and we had such a blast together! He is a pretty stellar missionary! We were able to talk to a lot of great people that day too. We met this one guy while knocking doors and it was crazy to see all the things we had in common! He played lacrosse, did swimming in high school, AND he really enjoys playing volleyball!! I have only met one other person on my mission that played lacrosse, but I have never met anyone that has done that many things I used to do! It was way cool! And even better than that, he is interested in learning about the church!!! Its like the cherry on top! Haha! He is high on our list to go see again this week and I am super excited, he is way awesome!

Friday we had our ward trunk or treat and that went really well! We had a lot of people there and a lot of less-actives and investigators! We were able to meet one of our recent converts daughter who is a non-member and hopefully we will be able to start teaching her because she is pretty awesome! 

Well thats mostly it for this week! Next week is going to be a really exciting time and I cant wait to see how everything turns out! Thank you for all the support and prayers. They are much appreciated! Love you all! :)

Elder Barazoto​

October 24, 2016

Dear family and friends,

It has been a great week! We have met a bunch of really nice people, some that we will hopefully start teaching this week! I am super excited about it all! We had Stake Coordination this week up in Fairmont, WV so Elder Webber and I had to drive up there! Fairmont isn't very far from Morgantown which is where WVU its pretty highly populated which was really awesome! Also as we were driving home after the meeting, we saw an i8 BMW! It was way awesome and I have pictures of it! Its really sweet! Ha!

But this week we taught a lot of awesome people. The other day, we taught that preacher again and it was really crazy! He went into his house and walked out with his Book of Mormon and a piece of page full of questions on it front and back! It was a pretty intense lesson! He asked us a lot about the origins of the Book of Mormon, how all of the other churches are wrong and if God and Jesus Christ are the same person. All things that I have been asked for my entire mission! We tied it all back to reading and praying to know for himself if the Book of Mormon is really the word of God and he agreed to it! I hope he does it sincerely because he is a really awesome guy and I can see him joining the church! It would be awesome! 

Talking to preachers of other faiths makes me eternally grateful for the truths found in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These men are truly amazing people who are doing their best to follow Jesus Christ the best way they know how! But we know that there is more, much more! The ability to baptized for the remission of sins, the ability to seal families together for time and all eternity, the ability to receive a renewal every single week because of the sacrament, guidance from a living modern day prophet, and many more! I know that this is God kingdom once again established on the earth with living prophets and apostles and his sacred priesthood authority. I know this work is true and I absolutely love teaching others about it seeing them accept these restored truths! There is no other work on this earth better than His! I love you all and I am so grateful for your love and support! Have a great week! :)

Elder Barazoto 

October 17, 2016

Dear Family and Friends!

What a wonderful week here in the good city of Clarksburg! I really like it here a lot, we have met a bunch of super great people this past week! One highlight of this week was we had interviews with President Salisbury! It was a little strange because I have always been pretty nervous to talk to him just because you always are trying to put your best foot forward when you are talking to your mission president, but this time it was super relaxed! We just walked around the church building and I of course learned so much from him! I think he is the best mission president in the whole world! :) I dont know how he finds time to do everything, but he does a lot! 

The day before interviews with President, we did an exchange with the Elders in Philippi. It was a really great experience! I was with Elder Young who finishes his mission at the end of this transfer and I sure did learn a whole lot from him! He is an awesome missionary! We found this super awesome family who we are teaching and I can see them having some great potential for sure! I am super excited!! Then at the end of the night we taught another guy who was sitting on his porch and enjoying the cool weather! We didn't expect what happen to happen but he ended up being a preach for one of the big churches in town! It was crazy! I have taught a bunch of preachers on my mission so it wasn't my first time! Ha! :) He has read the Book of Mormon twice now and has a ton of questions about it! We have pretty fun discussions because he knows a lot about the Bible, but so do we! Haha! Luckily he was a super nice guy and we were able to challenged him to read and sincerely pray to know that the Book of Mormon is true! I cant wait for our next lesson! I'm still waiting to baptize a preacher on my mission! :)

Things in Clarksburg are really starting to pick up here recently! We found another really awesome family who are going to be teaching again this week and we are super excited about them too! We have to attribute our success to this White Christmas we are doing as a mission. As a mission, we are reading the Book of Mormon all the way through from October to December 3rd! Its been a lot of work reading that much but the success that we have seen from it is totally worth it! Its cool to see how the more we sacrifice, the more Heavenly Father blesses us! Obedience = blessing! I love it! Haha! Thats mostly it for this week, and I also have pictures! Hurray!!!

Elder Barazoto​

October 10, 2016

Happy P-day everyone! It was a bit of a shorter week this week, but we've still seen a lot of cool things here in Clarksburg! Transfers were Thursday, so that was a bit of a headache but we had some really cool experiences while teaching people that day! We met this guy named Joe and he was searching for more answers in life when he saw the missionaries walking in front of his house! We were able to teach him and it was one of the coolest lessons I have been in in a long time! He agreed with everything we taught and wants to be baptized! It was awesome, the only bummer is he doesn't live in our area so the downtown Elders get to teach him... Haha but thats ok as long as he still gets baptized! Ha! :) 

So my new companion is Elder Webber, he is from South Weber, Utah and he is pretty great! He did a lot of golfing and snowboarding back home we have a lot of similarities! We get along great! He's been out for about 7 1/2 months so he is still a little fresh but I am super excited to see all the amazing success we are going to have!

On Saturday we met a super awesome part-member family! We were out trying to contact some people in a more rural part of our area when we found the house of the family. I didn't think anyone was living there because there were vines and moss growing all over the house but we tried it anyways and people were living there! Haha they invited us in right away which doesn't normally happen either but they are super nice people! The mom grew up in the church and at one point had missionaries living in her house! The dad is a non-member who helped build our church building! They are really awesome people and they want us to come back! I am pretty excited about teaching them. 

Thats mostly it for this week! Sorry I have been slacking on pictures I will try and send more next week! I love you all and I hope everyone has an awesome week! :)

Elder Barazoto​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I think I figured out how to send multiple pictures in one email! Hurray! :)​

Me and Elder Webber

This is the view from a hill in Clarksburg!

Me being goofy haha

We walk over this river almost every day! It makes me want to go canoeing again haha

This is a sweet house we found and I had to take a picture with it! Ha! 

The first is of downtown Clarksburg, pretty neat huh!

Elder Wozniak drew me boxing a burrito! Haha! Its pretty awesome!

The future temple in Clarksburg! ha!

October 5, 2016

Hi Everyone!

Wow what an amazing week! So many things to talk about I dont know where to begin! This week was transfers of course and there are some pretty crazy stuff happening here! Unfortunately Elder Palmer is getting transfered to Huntington, West Virginia... He was SO much fun to be companions with but the Lord has plans for him in Huntington! So my new companions name is Elder Webber and he is actually currently serving in Clarksburg downtown right now so he doesnt have very far to go to come with me! Ha! Its kind of strange but it is going to be super fun! I will have pictures of us next week, I promise!

The other highlight of this week was General Conference! It was honestly so amazing! I took so many notes it feel like I was writing for 8 hours straight! Ha! One talk that I particularly loved and wanted to remind you all about was Elder Oaks talk about missionary work. That talk hit me really hard and I would encourage everyone to rewatch that talk because it is amazing! Missionary work is truly the most important thing we can do as members of this church! There is honestly so much joy in sharing the gospel with those around us! 

Another cool thing that happened this week was on Monday we were teaching one of our investigators named Kaleb who is actually the son of some members in the ward. He is 9 so he has to be taught the missionary lessons before he is baptized. But when we got to their house we found out that they have a cousin living with them who is a non-member and she is interested in learning about the church! We were able to teach her a little bit about the gospel and she is coming to church this Sunday! It was such a huge blessing because she is super solid! She even wants to get baptized! I love seeing how prepared people are, it makes me so happy! 

I am loving my mission and all the amazing memories I am making out here! Clarksburg is a really cool place and I really love talking to all these wonderful West Virginians! I hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Barazoto