February 16, 2010

Hey family!

Sounds like another fun week. And I did get the package in time for S.A.D.(Single Awareness Day, AKA Valentine's Day), as Kaydee calls it now (I think it's clever, by the way). Thank you so much! And tell the twins thank you for me. And Elisha's my friend too. Make sure you tell him that for me. :-)

Glad to hear that dad is getting the Perry plan going. That can and will have amazing results if only more people would use it! I need to get the wards we cover to use it.

So I hear that the baby (... AKA Jason XIII (you know I'm going to call him that)) doesn't like spicy food. That's too bad. He must take after Alex. :-p He'll come around eventually, I'm sure. Don't worry-- I'll fix it. ;-) Spicy apple sauce or something. Just joking!!!


So. . . .

We had a baptism! As you can imagine I'm just a little bit excited about that. Russell was finally baptized. But man was it stressful. Let me back up, though, because I didn't have time to tell you the story.

We were planning on having the baptism the Saturday before last, as you remember. Well, Tuesday afternoon we got a phone call while we were at our zone's Zone Activity. I ran off to the side to answer it and it was Russell's daughter in law. She told me that the baptism was off because Russell's daughter had a heart attack and was in the hospital on life support and was not expected to make it. It really broke our hearts to hear that. He still wanted us to come by that night and have our lesson (we meet with him every Tue. and Thur.). So we went by and watched a DVD about how families can be together forever. It was really good. His daughter was taken off of life support a few days later and the funeral was on that Saturday.

Sunday we were in PEC meeting and the bishop asked what time the baptism was going to be on Saturday. We were really confused. We told him we hadn't yet set a new day for the baptism, let alone a time. He told us that Russell had told him that he was planning on being baptized that Saturday. So we got busy making plans for the baptism. We met with Russell and reserved the font and had everything set for three o' clock. But when we got there another baptism was going and was going long. Oh no! So we moved the service into the chapel and improvised as best we could and in the end it all worked out. :-) The service was actually really good. Elder Dursteler and I spoke. Russell's son baptized him. So now he is the newest member of the church, and a wonderful man. I'm really excited for him.

And now another miracle:
Elder Perry, when he spoke to us last year, told us all that we needed to teach at least twenty lessons a week. He also told us we needed to talk to 140 (10 per missionary per day/ 20 per companionship) people a week. He promised us that if we did, we would always have people to teach and we would baptize more. So this last week we were looking at our numbers Saturday night, and we saw that we had talked to plenty of people, but I only counted 15 lessons. !!!! I counted again and still got 15. I was really frustrated. There was no possible way we could teach 5 lessons on Sunday-- we had church all day. The most we could teach was 3. I prayed, counted again, and I realized I had missed two lessons. That put it at 17. So we needed to teach 3 lessons the next day. Not likely, but possible. I prayed really hard, and the next night we went out and worked as hard as we could to teach the last three people. We taught members at dinner, so there was one. Then we had some trouble but finally taught Bervena-- one of our investigaters. Two. By this time it was 8:30 and I was praying hard. And we managed to find one more person to teach. Walter, a new investigater now. He happened to be home and invited us in. wow!

We've also managed to find some more people to teach and set two baptismal dates for the 13th of March. I'll tell you more about them when I get more time.

In short, things are going good and I'm loving everything here.

Can't think of anything else too exciting off the top of my head. Hope everything goes good for you this next week.

Love you all,
Jason

PS..... Who doesn't like making me cards? lol. J/k. BTW: Tell Alexandra and Elisha that I can be BOTH of their friends. It's okay, I can handle it. :-)

I have 30 seconds left.
Love you all!
Bye!!!