Sacrifice 5 minutes!

God's Plan

Squad!

Happy New Year!!! I hope you were all able to go have some fun on New Years, stay up until midnight, wait for the anti climatic "yayyyyyy it's a New Year!", and then head home. Pretty much happens every year so over here, we were just ready to get back to work! New Years Eve we couldn't be out past 6pm and then New Years Day was spent as a non pros day but with some fun parties at the Badgers and then later at the Stake Presidents house. Needless to say, we were itching to get going after a slow start to the week.

Throughout the week, we were able to just see miracle after miracle. We saw it today with Emily bringing her grandma and dad to church again, and a member bringing her coworker! Lots of good stuff. When that is happening, that makes the "work" feel like it's nothing really at all. It gets you going and makes you not really wanting to stop. Last week, we had a great lesson with our friend Christine. With some crazy things going down in her life, progressing towards baptism is a little bit of a slower process. She has that desire but sooner or later we thought we would face her commitment level lacking. So we committed her to read a chapter in the Book of Mormon every day. A pretty hefty task considering she is not the fastest reader... fast forward to this week and we have our follow up lesson with her. And let me tell you, it seemed like a different woman. Her countenance had completely changed, she had a pep in her step, a big smile on her face, and filled with light. She sat down and started talking about her week, relating the story of Nephi and Lehi heading into the wilderness and everything to her exact situation she is going through right now. She said that she was just seeing the love of God and His guidance in every detail of her life thanks to reading the Book of Mormon. That's powerful right there and was just so cool to see that change and sense of direction. Moral of the story: you want your own pep in your step, more happiness, and some good feels, sacrifice 5 minutes from Netflix and read the Book of Mormon.

Later in the week, Elder Matthews and I were out contacting when we ran into one of the biggest, scariest, most jacked Liberian I had ever seen. He was awesome and even speaks English that you can understand! His name was Mark and just a total stud. After stopping back a little bit later, he let us in and started telling us his story. He was actually already baptized back in Texas and a member of the Church but his wife is not and said she would be totally down to learn. More details on her coming soon. But the best part of meeting Mark was his sense of relief that "God had found him again to bring him back to his family." Being a typical Liberian, if the address to church is not just right in front of them, they think all is lost and there is no way of finding it ever again so they go to another random church. Super whack, kinda funny and a little annoying but...... Mark's reaction to all of this was priceless. You could sense the relief and desire to feel that love that comes with being part of "the family". That love and family, Mark had missed and sadly had no idea how to find it again so he was lost. He found it again, and as a result, he will be treating us to the lovely, play dough like dish of fufu. What did we get ourselves into... Gotta love it!

Kelly is looking good for baptism in the coming weeks! Both her and Emily had already started Family History for names to take the temple before we had even taught it to them so that pretty much sums them up. Who are the real teachers here??? I dont even know.

Mouse count is up to 12 with no end in sight (landlord has still not gotten back to us... sick). We're going for 20.

Love you all!! Go skiing for me.

E. Christensen

Obviously!

Family Tree

Escaping from the Mice!