Dear Familie,
First off, tell Bob that I feel his pain; I was at that busiest Friday, and if it was double that, well, everyone's nerves must have sat highly on edge.
This week, as usual, went by far too fast. It never really feels like a whole week went by; in fact, it usually feels like one or two days at most.
The big things that happened this week were first, an awesome lesson with one of our investigators, at a member's home. Louis is the 18 year old that we have been working with for the past few weeks, and has born his testimony in Sacrament. We taught the third lesson, the Doctrine of Christ, and it went really well. We also worked to set a baptismal date, and were able to do so, though it is a ways off, for a really awesome reason. Apparently, he wants to wait for now until after General Conference, because he and his fellowshipping family were given tickets to go to the Conference Center. Louis said that he wanted to wait so that he could be sure that Thomas S. Monson is a Prophet before he was baptized.
The second awesome thing is Stake conference itself. First off, we just had a new projector system installed in the McCall building, so we were able to have it streamed up, rather than having to drive 2 hours down to Weiser for it. Next, even though it was stake conference (which half of the members seem to avoid), we still had 8 different investigators come, one of which was Louis' girlfriend Abby, who he drove down for about 3/4 of an hour to get from Cascade. The whole meeting was great, and i felt like there was something said for each of our investigators personally. Most of them have similar struggles, and there was one analogy that really stood out as being able to touch every single one of them. It was a story about a man who had had a fascination with butterflies as a child, and as his wife was getting ready to have their first child, he regained that interest. One day, he found a cocoon that had somehow managed to survive a fall from a tree nearby the park bench he was sitting on at the time. He took it home, and watched it grow in a mason jar that he place on the window. One day, the cocoon started to shake, with ever increasing strength, until the man thought that the butterfly would die from the struggle. He took a penknife and made a tiny slit in the cocoon and within seconds, the butterfly was free. It walked around the jar just fine, but it wouldn't fly away. At first, the man thought it was just waiting for its wings to dry, but time passed, and still it stayed walking. The man called a friend of his that knew more of the insect than he did, and told him the story. When he got to the slit that he had mad in the cocoon, the friend stopped him and said, "There is the problem. The struggle gives them the strength to fly."
A lot of our investigators seem to have hard things holding them down, and i was really glad to hear that show that there is a reason for hard things in life.
Well, those are the major stories from this week. Thank you for yours, and for listening to mine.
Love and Insanity, Elder Stuver
