Monday, September 8, 2014

Dear Family and Friends,

This week was pretty sick! Elder Stallings and I had a great time. We were teaching more than usual and we had some cool finding experiences. We were randomly impressed to go by a Less Active guy and see if he's home. He's usually pretty busy and just says to give him a call but we decided to drop by. We talked with him and his fiancee. She's talked with Missionaries before and because Adrian (the LA guy and her fiancee) reads the Book of Mormon a lot and her family are all Mormon, she is pretty familiar with the Book of Mormon and the church. She said that she's thought about baptism before and that she thinks it would be good but she wants to take things slow. So we didn't set a date but we definitely talked with her about it. Hopefully she turns out well.

This week we had a great turnout at church. We had a Less active member bring his wife, daughter, and his cousin and his wife. It was way cool. the Less Active guy has been an awesome missionary to his family by being an example with coming back to church and having scripture study. We moved the Less active's records into our ward so he can get involved with the ward. 

Our investigator Michael came and he was baptized after church!! He's gone through a lot of missionaries and we were super excited to help him finally make the covenant of baptism. After he was baptized he said, "man, I wish I had done that way sooner!" That was a really cool thing to hear because it brought peace to our hearts that he really was converted and his life has been changed. He's a super solid guy and he knows a lot of ward members really well. We were so blessed to be able to have that experience with Michael.

On a bit of a lighter note, while Michael was getting changed we decided to watch some Mormon Messages. Sounds easy enough right? Wrong. What happened was when I moved the tv somehow the DVD player turned off. So, I figured I'd deal with that later. In the mean time I decided to try and get the tv into the center of the room. Well, as I was doing that one of the wheels of the tv stand fell off and the tv was about a second away from falling off...So hurriedly The Bishop came over to help and he held up the tv while I tried to shimmy the wheel back in place. So now the tv is in the center of the room where everyone can see it. Good. After 20-30 seconds of quietly panicking I somehow got the DVD player to turn on. I say somehow because I have no clue how it got turned off or how I turned it back on. Okay, now the DVD player is on, the tv is on and in the right place, now all I need to do is have the DVD run. If only it were that easy. The Mormon Messages DVD we have has it's own little special menu....and it doesn't really work very well. It's sorta ghetto. To add to that the menu for some odd reason doesn't come up on the tv because it's cut off. So I blindly navigated through the menu and found the first video to play. That video plays and it's all good. Now we need to get to the next video and of course out of all 30 of them that are on the DVD I pick the only one that is entirely in Spanish...Way to go. But even after all that everyone enjoyed the videos and the baptism. The Lord helped everything work out in the end. He always does!

I love all of you tons, at least this much |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Imagine how much God loves you.

Keep it real

Elder Sanderson

 Oh, p.s. after 8 transfers (for those of you who are not missionaries that's a little under a year) I've been released from serving as a District Leader. It's a bittersweet change but now the Lord wants me to be back to focusing all my attention and energy on my area and my companion. Being a District Leader has been such a great blessing for me and I'm excited for this new change!

Lovelovelove