Happy Easter! The Jordan River in Bangalore?!

 the baptism of Vishnu's family!

funny picture I took of Elder Raju outside a mechanic shop

Hello hello!!  Happy Easter, everyone, hope you had a good one.  The only egg I encountered this weekend was the one we were fed at lunch yesterday along with our Easter feast.

This week was pretty solid for us.  We had transfers this week so there were a lot of people coming and going.  But guess who's staying in Bengaluru? You guessed it: me!  I'm stoked.  I love Bangalore.

The highlight of this week was definitely the baptisms of Sister Shamala and Vennila.  So the night before their baptismal service, I spent like an hour cleaning the font in hopes that the water would be clean and clear.  We had the security guard fill the font in the morning before the baptisms, and what color was the water?  BROWN.  We were so confused, and I was a sad for a moment, I thought I did an okay job cleaning the font.  We soon came to know that, for whatever reason, the pipes filled the font with recycled water.  Welcome to India.  Unfortunate though the circumstance was, we told the sisters to imagine they were being baptized in the Jordan River and everything went well.

I don't know how much I've mentioned about these two sisters, but here's a brief intro: Sister Shamala is the wife of our mission driver, Vishnu.  Sister Vennila is her sister.  After their marriage, Vishnu and Shamala joined a church and were members of that church for about ten years.  Vishnu found our church through one of his friends and was baptized about five years ago.  At first, his wife had no interest to learn about our church, let alone join.  But over the years, her heart has been softened as she's seen profound changes in her husband: Vishnu reads the scriptures (particularly the Book of Mormon) daily, he is kinder to her and their children, he attends church each week, etc.  Though it's taken a few years, she finally told her husband that she wanted to join our church.  So Vishnu invited us to teach his wife and a few weeks later, she is baptized!  They are one step closer to becoming an eternal family.  It is an immense blessing to assist Heavenly Father in His beautiful work of uniting families.

Also this is hilarious: we were meeting with Mayur, recent convert, about his study of the Book of Mormon, he gave this synopsis, "Nephi and his family got transferred [by God] from the Jerusalem continent to the U.S."

I hope everyone has a good week and keeps the faith!

Elder Tuscano