I have been able to learn so much from the Book of Mormon and it is something that has changed my life forever

    Well, the weather has taken a turn for the wetter and it has cooled off a lot. It has been any where from 16-21 degrees (Celsius) all week! This week has also been a lot of fun too! Elder Christiansen and I really get along well and have been having a lot of fun together but still do get missionary work done. We were able to teach Axcel who is 15 and his mom is a member but he was never Baptized so we have been working with him over the last 4 weeks and he has come to church the last 3 weeks and he has made some good friends in the young mens too. We went over to have dinner with them this last Tuesday and had a really good lesson about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and we were able to set a baptismal date with him for October 8th and it was so good because since he has been coming to church and the young men have befriended him he has liked coming to church a lot more.  He is one of the only people that we are teaching that does not have a commandment problem so we are really trying to focus on helping him to read and pray daily  to help strengthen his testimony.

     We were also able to teach James a couple times this week and he is doing so good! He is not going to get baptized this weekend but on the 25th he will be! He quit smoking and we are going to help him prepare to be baptized and he is doing so well! He has been reading from the Book of Mormon every day and has been coming to church every week so he is way solid and is really progressing a ton and has really been a miracle!

     We have also been able to see a lot of our other investigators and Elder Chirstiansen has been picking up everything really good. One thing he is still holding on to is that he really likes to use puns, and not very good ones at that ;),  so we'll see if that goes but for now he is still going strong. This week has been really good and reading the Book of Mormon has been awesome! I am even learning things from the Isaiah Chapters which I usually never do. One thing that really stuck out to me is in 2 Nephi 16:8-12. It is like a conversation Isaiah has with the Lord and the Lord asks who he will send to go for him and Isaiah responds to send him and so the Lord tells him essentially to preach the Gospel and then Isaiah ask how long he wants him to do it for and the Lord tells him to do it until the cities waste away which I think is like his way of saying forever. It really hit me because I will not be a missionary forever but I have been called and we all have and it does not end when the badge is off or the church clothes are hung up but we are called forever and always to share the Gospel. I have been able to learn so much from the Book of Mormon and it is something that has changed my life forever and I hope I will continue to let it do that forever!

Love Elder Slack

Loving the people that we teach will help us become the best teachers we can be

 This week was great! It was a little harder to see people that it usually is but  things still worked out it just took a little more effort than normal but we where able to see most of the people that we are teaching. We had a couple that we started teaching 4 weeks ago came to church yesterday and it was so awesome! Their names are Mathew and Crystal  and they loved Church which was good because we had a combined priesthood relief society meeting and we discused the ward mission plan and they where not confused or weirded so as long as we get through fast sunday with them everything should be good! We went and stopped by after church and talked to them about how they liked it and they told us they really enjoyed it and they loved the classes and then crystal told us how she has been going online and chating with missionaries on mormon.org and asking questions and she has really enjoyed it! They are so cool. They told us how they are going to 100 mile house, which is like 8 hours north of Abbotsford, and we told them that we had a church up there too and they told us that they wanted to go to our church while that they are up there. 

  

  We were also able to see Joel this week and Elder Hunter and I  have really been focusing on helping people progress and we really wanted to help Joel to keep progressing since he came to church last week and so we had planed to talk about Baptism and priesthood Authority because he has been struggling with believing that there is only one true church but when we went there we ended up teaching Repentance and found out that he has really been struggling with forgiving him self and is not sure where he will go after this life so we talked a lot about how God will forgive us and how that is what he wants to do because he loves us so if we repent he will forgive as long as we are sincere. It was a really good lesson and the spirit was very strong and it was really great! He commited to pray to know if God forgives him of the things that he has done in the past. 

  

   I also was studying charity this week because we had a fireside with President Burt's family and one of the things that one of his sons talked about is how loving the people that we teach will help us become the best teachers we can be because if we love the people we will want to do everything that to help them progress. So I have been studying Charity to help my teaching and when we taught Joel we really focused on loving him and showing him that we really care about him and want the best for him and it was so awesome! It was one of the best lessons that we had with him and I have had on my mission all because of the love that we showed him!

   The only thing that was not that fun this week was that it rained everyday this week. I don't think I have ever seen it rain everyday for a whole week in my life so that was a mile stone for me. Besides that nothing crazy happened this week.

Love Elder Slack

Winter Showers bring spring flowers?

Well, this week was really wet! It has rained a ton here this last week. I now know why they say spring showers because it has pretty much been raining non stop this week except for some random times when it gets sunny and then it rains again. I feel like I have seen more rain in the last 4 weeks than I have in the first 18 years of my life. I never thought I would have to deal with rain when I came to Canada. I thought I would be walking in 2 feet of snow everyday and riding dog sleds.

Rain, rain and more rain

 Anyways on Tuesday Gary, our investigator who told us he didn't want to meet for a while, told us he wanted us to come by and talk with him so we did and at first he told us he didn't want to come to church for a while but by the end of the lesson he committed himself to come to church! He also told us that Carol is probably going to be getting out of the hospital soon! So it seems like their life is finally going to be getting back to normal soon and hopefully we can start helping them get over their smoking addiction and help them get baptized because for Gary the only thing holding him back is his Word of Wisdom problem. He identifies himself as a Mormon when he talks to people. He is really cool. He just needs to stop having big problems happen so we can focus on helping him. 

  Probably the coolest thing that happened this week is when one of our appointments fell through and we where going to go street contacting but it was raining really good and we figured no one would be walking out side so we went tracting on this random street. The first house we knocked on we meet a guy named Jassi and we taught him about Baptism on the doorstep and asked him if he would like to be baptized and he said Yes!! We set up a time to come back the next day. So we came back and we were really nervous that he didn't speak English because we run into a lot of East Indians who don't speak English and just say yes to us. So we thought that is what happened but when we went back we taught him, his wife and their daughter the restoration and they said that they would read and pray about the book of Mormon as a family! It was really Awesome! It was even cooler because that is the first family that I have found and taught on my mission.

 Well sorry this letter is so short but I don’t know what else to write about unless you want to know a good talk to read and in that case read the talk called "His Grace is Sufficient" by Brad Wilcox. It is amazing!! (it is amazing by the way)

Love Elder Slack