¡Hola todos!  ¡Feliz año nuevo!  That means happy new years, as you can tell I'm making a lot of progress with my Spanish haha.

It's been a pretty slow but really good week down here.  With all of the holidays, no one has been in town and I mean no one!  We walked down the street and the only people we saw were drunk guys sleeping on the side of the road haha.

The good news is that we are finally going to move houses next week, which we are really excited about.  Every time I take a shower I just keep thinking "y more days..." haha yea we can't wait.

We had transfers this last Wednesday, I forgot to mention last week, I'm still here in the same sector, which will make a total of 6 months here by the end of this transfer, which is really wierd, but I'm happy about it.  We still have a ton of work to do here.

So not a whole ton of news about investigators this week unfortunately... We've had a bunch of appointments fall with everyone, plus José's baptismal date fell this week because he didn't come to church, so we'll have to work with him on that.  The good news is that Ariel and Leslie came and we have a couple appointments with them this week.  We're planning on challenging them to get married and baptized this week.  I've been thinking a lot about our purpose as missionaries, as it says in Preach My Gospel "invite others to come unto Christ by helping them to recieve the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His atonement, repentance, baptism, recieving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end."  The key word for me there is invite.  With them, I've been a little afraid to offend them by inviting them to be married and baptized.  So we're going to do it and allow the Spirit to work on them.

Our stake is starting a new program this week of reading the Book of Mormon, we're all going to read it together, two chapters a day, starting Sunday. If you haven't read the talk "The Book of Mormon, The Keystone of our Religion" by President Benson, I would encourage you to do it.  He explains how many blessings can come into our lives from the Book of Mormon.  If you want to read with us you can do that too!

So this week began my entire year in the service of the Lord.  Each missionary has one.  As I look back and realize that I have been here on my mission for almost six months already I can't believe it.  The time is really flying by and I can't believe it.  Now, I look at this next year 2014 and I know that the time is going to go by even faster.  I want to make sure that I'm taking advantage of every moment of this year.

Hope you all have a great week.  I love you all!

Love, Elder Dower