October 5, 2012

Oí Família!! Well I have to say that when I saw these pictures I couldn´t believe my eyes! Derek looks like they took Joshua, cut off his head and took dereks head and put on Joshua´s body! hahaha Don´t tell them that I said that, though. :) Looks like you guys had fun at Silverwood. Oh and I hadn´t realized that Krystine had come home to see Joshua go through the temple, that´s why I didn´t understand when you said that there were 5 Jolsteads there. Oh and mother you look a lot slimmer. Not that you weren´t slim before, but you look a lot slimmer. :) That is very sad about Kurtis. He´s fine though right? I mean with the sickness that he caught. That is one of the risks that we have here. But its not as bad as you think. And even more important is that even if the food could give us some disease the Lord won´t let that happen unless its suppose to and its for our good. The Lord wouldn´t have let Kurtis get sick if it wasn´t what was suppose to happen and what the Lord wanted to happen. It is sad though. I forgot to tell you that a missionary came home here in Santa Maria who knew Kurtis in the mission. An Elder Hammer I think. Anyway this week was very different. The President sent us both, me and my companion to work with 2 different companionships of Zone Leaders. So basically we left our area with no one working here for 2 days. Something interesting is that the President said that if we did this we shouldn´t worry about our area here because the Lord would bless us. So we left Tuesday. I stayed here in Santa Maria to help the ZL´s here. It was a pretty awesome experience. The first day it was raining a lot and they had the whole day planed. We prayed before left asking the Lord to help us find a family too. Then at one point after lunch one of the elders lost his planner and with it all the addresses of the people that we´d visit that day. So we were a little sad about that so we said a prayer and asked the Lord to help us find his planner. Then we searched for a long time and decided to just let it go for now and try to find new investigators. So we spent most of the afternoon doing that. Then at night we were walking and we saw a woman walking with her daughter with a ton of grocieres in the rain. So we went up to her and offered help and gave her our umbrella. So we walked with her to her house and we talked with her about her family. She has 8 children and she said that she going to a church but doesn´t like it anymore because of all the ridiculous rules that they have there and how she is looking for a church to join. Well you can guess how happy we were: 8 children, looking for a new church to join; we knew from the beginning that this family was prepared to hear the gospel. So we arrived at her house and we taught the Restoration and at the end we invited them to be baptized and they accepted and when we invited them come to church she looked at her husband and said, ´´I don´t know about you but I´m going this Sunday.`` So anyway if you think that this experience is cool guess what happened after we left their house...We found the planner that had been lost with all those addresses. Something that I realized after was that all this was so that we could find that family, because if that Elder hadn´t have lost his planner we would have gone to all these other plans and we never would have found that family and even cooler was the fact that the Lord answered both prayers: Find a family and find the planner. Everything worked out perfectly, just how the Lord wanted it. And even better was when we came back to our area to work yesterday, the Lord really did bless me and my companion like the president said. We found 3 people who were also prepared to hear the gospel and were able to teach more lessons then we usually can in one day. We taught them and they accepted to baptized as well. So anyway that was a cool experience. If we´re obedient and do our part the Lord will do his part and everything will work out, even when we aren´t able to see how it could work out as perfectly as it does. That´s what Moroni means when he talks about the trial of our faith. That´s crazy that Joshua is leaving this week. He shouldn´t worry though the MTC is awesome. He´d better learn to like it too because he´ll be there for 3 months haha. Anyway so I´m excited about conference. It´ll give me that extra boost. So anyway that´s about it. We should be having another baptism here soon. The problem is we need to marry her first and that´s proving to be a lot harder then it should be. It seems like there´s everything going against her and we haven´t been able to start the marriage process yet, but today we´ll try again. Have a great week. love you guys Elder Jolstead