2.23.14

Hey,

I'm glad to hear that Maddie got baptized and that Granddad was able to do it. Our mission leader is pretty old in our branch and he loves baptizing people so it reminded me of him repeating the words a million times. This week was super long, but very successful. We left with a girl named Andrea (return missionary) to go visit basically the entire relief society and a couple of our investigators and she put us to work...we have been super focused on the people that we have marked down in our agendas to go visit, that we forget about all of the many people that the Lord places in our paths to visit in the streets and all of that. But by the end of the week, we had increased the assistance in the church by 50 percent...all we need is to get 25 more people in the church to take the sacrament and our branch will be a WARD... which the mission has been trying to do since the time that Pte Smith (my mission pres.) served in my exact branch. So things went well this week… but i am definitely dead now. Luckily we get to go to the temple...we're going on an 8 hour bus ride to Montevideo with the zone for a zone conference and to go to the temple so i am super excited. Oh and i gave a talk in church yesterday about repentance and it went really well. I based everything off of the conversion of Alma the younger (the chapter when he was telling it to his son Helaman. 36) I used a personal story about the part where Alma says that he didn't want to return to the presence of his father. I said that in high school i failed a test and i knew that my father was going to find out, but i didn't tell him because i knew he would punish me. Later in that week i was driving to go to a friend’s house and I received a message from my dad saying, ''come here now, son. You're in big trouble.'' and I went on to explain how the drive home was awful...i did not want to return to the presence of my father to receive the wrath he had there waiting for me. I also explained the importance of Alma thinking about his MANY sins. sometimes we are willing to repent of the BIG sin but forget about all of the little sins to lead us up to the action...like not praying, not reading the scriptures, not going to church, putting ourselves in dangerous locations, not breaking up with our boyfriend/girlfriend...if we are trying to stop smoking but we don't stop buying the cigarettes we will never stop smoking...so for three days and three nights Alma was tormented...he didn't only risk his soul but the souls of others. I said that every one of us will be placed in moments like this where we will have nowhere to go… without knowing what we should do… no way of escaping... but like Alma, we have to remember who came to the earth to redeem us from sin. So that we can experience what Alma did...there couldn't have been anything so intense and awful as was his pain but at the same time, there couldn't have been anything so sweet and incredible as was his happiness. It was a good talk and everyone, of course, liked my stories and stuff. 

But we are rushed today because we have to get on a bus and leave early so i don't have much else to say. I will email you next week. 

E' McRae