January 7th, 2013

Hey Family!

Hope that the weekend was a blast, now the holidays are over these emails will get more regular again. Haha, I loved the bulls eye shirt, represent Paige! Does the "Run Forest Run" shirt still exist too? I'm sure you'll do awesome in school mom, you're so close! We have a few branches up here in Sudbury (it's the smallest Stake in the mission as far as I'm aware. Our ward, the biggest in the stake, has less people than the Christie ward) that struggle a lot. But the work will move on and every little effort makes a huge difference!  

I loved the excerpt from Jesse's email. I remember my first day in the field my companion and I met a lady in a parking lot who was crying and said that she wanted to commit suicide and the only thing stopping her was her children. At that moment I was kind of like "uh... am I seriously supposed to give this person advice right now, this is life or death! I've never even lived away from home before and I'm supposed to relate to what she's telling us!" So yeah, totally sympathize,  we have no clue what we're doing! The Lord has a remarkable way of using awful dull instruments and doing great work to bless the people around them.

So I'll be brief but the end of the week was great. Stefan is doing really well. He has a growing testimony and is set to be baptized this weekend: PRAY FOR HIM!! He has been living the commandments and he needs the strength to keep it up this week, and I'm sure Satan is going to throw everything he's got at him, so please keep him in your prayers!

So kind of a cool experience. This last fast Sunday I was fasting to know if I had been properly following the promptings of the Spirit and if I was bringing the Spirit into people's lives as expected. We get to church and lo and behold a less active member who we visited a few weeks ago showed up.  

We had dropped by, and then the next week we went over again to see how they were doing. He has a non member wife who is somewhat resistant to the church. They were sick and obviously giving blessings is something sacred and we knew the wife was not exactly supportive of her husband on the church, but for some reason I felt we should offer to give them a blessing. We did, and surprisingly not only he but she accepted the offer and we blessed them both.  

So on Sunday we are in Sunday School and he bore his testimony about the power of the priesthood. He shared that the night before we had stopped by they had been arguing about how to make Christmas a more special experience and then we showed up and taught them about the true meaning of Christmas, and then he said how grateful he was that we had come by to give them a blessing and said that it had strengthened them when they needed it.  

We also met with Stefan at church on Sunday and he said that on Thursday when we met, he had gotten an answer to his prayer about whether the book of Mormon is true. I had asked him to kneel down right there and ask specifically, but in the moment he said he hadn't gotten an answer. On Sunday he admitted to second guessing himself and said that he had received an answer that night.

Anyways, that was a really long round-about way of explaining how God answered my prayer and question. He sent two people to church to tell me that they had felt blessed by our labors in the mission field and by following promptings received. It was a very tangible answer that meant a lot to me, how grateful I am for, as Elder Bednar puts it "the Lord's tender mercies".  

Love you all, work hard, play hard and enjoy life out there! Hope that January isn't too cold! Have a great week!