Dear Family,
I am recovered from my food poisoning stint. Well it is finally
starting to feel like winter here. We had our first snowing of the
season yesterday. All of it is gone today, but the temperatures are
below freezing so it gave me a good excuse to break out my big fluffy
russian winter coat. Yesterday we went to our investigators houses and
scraped the snow off of their cars for them and to make sure they were
coming to church, but unfortunately none of the ones we visited came.
We did have one father who is not a member attend with his family and we
set up a church presentation for next monday night to do as a Family
Home Evening. If you haven't sent off the christmas packages yet, i've
thought of something else i could use. Ear bud headphones would be nice
to have for when we are on mormon.org
in the library so i can listen to the videos and such. With all the
hype of Santa going around I was thinking the other day about when Clark
would come to our house as Santa and specifically when Wade was sitting
on his lap and asked for ski poles. However he had to promise to help
with the dishes or else he would only get one ski pole. It makes me
smile to think about and that's the memory of the week.
So we actually picked up 3 new investigators this
week. 2 of them were former investigators that we got back in contact
with and started teaching again. One of them is named Beverly and she
is 83 years old. She really loves the church, but her son is mostly
what is holding her back. We always have good lessons with her though
and a sweet spirit is there when we teach with her. Our other new
investigator actually came from the new roommate of a less-active in the
ward. We as missionaries are assigned to 3 people to be their home
teachers. We went to home teach this lady and her roommate was pretty
interested in the church so we actually ended up teaching the first
discussion. It was awesome! We taught our investigator Kirk a super
sweet lesson. We taught all about faith. We talked about prayer as
well and he actually told us that he feels like his prayers are being
heard now. He even had a tear brought to his eye while praying and he
now recognizes what the Holy Ghost feels like and that God indeed
answers prayers. We set a baptismal date with him for Januray 19th.
We got news that the transfer of February to March is
only going to be 5 weeks now instead of 6 weeks. Then the transfer
cycles will be going back to 6 weeks again like normal after that. So
in the grand scheme of things, i'll be coming home a week earlier, just
one day shy of my 2 year mark. I heard from my friend Zach who is
serving in Ukraine that he is coming home 4 weeks earlier because of the
cycle changes in his mission. It's exciting to have these changes
happening and to start receiving more missionaries into the field. I
got a letter from Whitney a couple of weeks ago to answer your
question. I know that she is going to be serving a mission! And that
her papers are received in SLC. I'm excited to see where she will go.
The family from Africa... Saliboko, Tunza, Mawazo, and Pascal were all
baptized on Saturday. I was really glad to see that they were baptized.
My thought of the day comes from Helaman 3. Some
context: members of the church are starting to become prideful because
they are prospering in the land. They also just had 10,000 baptisms.
Probably pretty stoked at this point. The verse I want to focus on
though is verse 35. It says: Nevertheless they did afast and bpray oft, and did wax stronger and stronger in their chumility, and firmer and firmer in the faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the dpurifying and the esanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their fyielding their hearts unto God.
We had a lesson in Elders quorom about forgiveness and
we talked about the need to be humble in order to forgive and to be
forgiven. This verse kept coming back to my mind. Sometimes we think
of humility as weakness, but we see that when we wax stronger and
stronger in humility, our faith becomes firmer and firmer in Christ. In
Jacob we learn that- and having all these bwitnesses we obtain a hope, and our faith becometh unshaken, insomuch that we truly can ccommand in the dname
of Jesus and the very trees obey us, or the mountains, or the
waves of the sea. We can do all things in line with the will of
God when our faith is great. So humility really equals strength. There
are other things that I love about Helaman 3:35, but no time to tell
you all of them. I will tell you this though, that i know the church is
true. I know that the book of mormon is true. I love you all!
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