Just Kidding!
Dear family and friends,
This week was sooo great! The Lord is really stretching forth his hand here in Stroud. We are getting all geared up for Caroline's baptism this Saturday! I can't believe this week has finally come! We went over the baptismal interview questions with Caroline last week and we were concerned about her to be honest. She is still struggling with some things and we were worried that we would have to postpone her baptism because she wasn't ready. I don't think I have ever prayed so much for someone else before. The Lord truly heard and answered our prayers, and when we went to see her the next, day her countenance had completely changed and she is most definitly ready. Our District leader, Elder Stoddard, was very impressed by her when he interviewed her on Friday. And she is excited for her baptism too! We also committed 2 more of our investigators to dates this week. We are so blessed, I love knowing that the Lord is preparing the minds and hearts of these people to be able to accept such commitments. Committing to this gospel is no small task. It truly is a life changing experience but it is the BEST life changing experience you could imagine.
There is a bug going around and lots of people have been sick. Elder Stoddard and his comp Elder Reed were both pretty sick so I made them chicken noodle soup....it turned out ok. They liked it anyway. Luckily it didn't make them more sick. :) I thought I was going to be sick yesterday because I ate some pretty bad chicken...you know chicken is bad when it tastes like fish. But luckily I woke up this morningno worse for wear. Yet another tender mercy from the Lord!
One of our investigators, Ingrid, has two sons that don't like to be in on the lessons. For some reason spirituality just isn't the cool thing for teenage boys. But we invited one of the YSA who is also in the YM presidency to come teaching with us in hopes that he might be able to get the boys inetersted. and he did!! They really connected with him and stayed in on our lesson with Ingrid. We taught them about prayer and her 16 year old had some really great insights in to prayer and what kinds of things he could pray about. He started to ask us why there were so many religions and how we could know what was really true. Sister Hedemark, Dane (YSA guy), and I all just got the biggest grins on our faces! I love it when people ask that question!! Unfortunately we were already late getting home but we told him that we could pray to know what was true and that we would tell him all about a boy Joseph Smith who had a similar question when we came next time. He was happy about that.
Our service at the horse stable this week went really well. We really connected with the less active lady who runs the place and she said that she loves Thursdays (that's the day that we come) and that she is very grateful to us. We were so pumped to learn more about her and we were able to find out the reason why she stopped coming to church and it just helped light a fire under us even more. We have only been there for a few weeks and she already trusts us so much! We hope that that trust will help rebuild that bridge between her and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We met this really crazy guy this week on the street. Which is fairly normal for Stroud, this is a fairly hippie town. However, what made it different from anyone else is why I am sharing this story with you. We were standing outside of the church waiting for a lday we had planned to meet there and this man named Nigel walked by. So we started to talk to him about the Book of Mormon and he was really interested and wanted to meet with us again. He was very apologetic for not having money to pay for the book but we told him that it was free and he got even more excited. So we set up a time where we could see him agian. When we met with him again at the church all he wanted to do was debate and swear and talk about drugs and the destruction of the planet! It was crazy! we tried to contain the situation and it just wasn't happening. Finally Sister Hedemark very boldly said that we were representatives of Jesus Christ and as such our puropse is to teach and help people feel the spirit and if that was not something that he was interested in that we were going to leave. I was stunned. He was too I think but he promised to not say a word for 15 minutes and he stayed true to his word. needless to say we didn't feel right about setting up a return appointment so we didn't. I hope one day that he opens up his heart a little more to hearing about the gospel
That's all for this week I have taken too much time already! But I love you all and I am very grateful for all of the letters and emails! :)
Sister Benson
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