Another Week Gone By

Hello all,

This week was interesting. Our on-date, Eva is still steadily progressing towards baptism this saturday! It is amazing to see her progress towards her baptism. She had nearly no knowledge of God or Jesus Christ until a couple of months ago when she entered rehab. She has gained a lot of knowledge during the last couple of weeks and in turn, I have seen a change in her life. Because she insisted on having her baptism on Saturday morning, we got special permission from President Larkin to go ahead and miss part of the General Authority's talk and do the baptism in the same building! In other news, Eva asked me to perform the baptism and my companion to give the Holy Ghost. They are both firsts for us and I especially am excited because I have never done it before.

I spoke in Sacrament Meeting yesterday. I was asked on Friday night to speak on Ch. 8 in PMG about planing and setting goals. It was a pretty boring subject, but I hope that someone out there got something out of it. I included the Dutch Potato story and talked about how the Mission President set goals and had the faith that they would and could be accomplished.

We continue to teach other Less-Actives in our ward. Anne and her 4 kids are probably my favorite. We send her scripture reading assignments every day and I have seen increased faith in her life and more power to overcome temptations. Her testimony of the Book of Mormon has increased and in turn, my testimony of the Book's power to truly change lives has increased. We have started reading the Book of Mormon with the people we teach and I have realized that the doctrines taught in the book and the spirit felt while reading it has the power to change people more than just I can. Yesterday in church we talked about the scriptures a lot and the importance of "likening" the scriptures to yourself and of taking time to think about what we read as we study.

On Saturday Elder Ouassil and I spent some time at Habitat for Humanity. We put siding up on the house. As much as I love donating time doing that, the process takes much longer than it should and there are way too many mistakes done because much of the building is done by people who don't know what they are doing. In the morning we spent 2 hours putting up 3 large siding boards beacuse they had to be cut for windows. But it is always good to donate your time to a good cause like that. 

This is going to be a great week with 2 exchanges with other Elders, a baptism, and 2 general authorities coming. I love and miss you all. The Church is true!

~Rich