4/29/2013

Bonjour Ma Famille,

Well, it has been another great week to be a missionary.  Number one miracle of the week, the two Campaner children were finally baptized!  I heard that it was absolutely wonderful and that everything went perfectly.  I am so happy for them.  They will be the first people that I have taught to be baptized, that's super exciting.  Even though I wasn't able to be there for the event, I feel so blessed to have gotten to witness some of the steps of the miracle.

It was another down week in the apartment.  I'm not really sure that things could be more organized and my mind feels a little bit like mush after so many hours of studying the gospel.  I am definitely getting through a lot of material and it's great.  I am learning a lot.  It's kind of making up for my laziness in seminary.  In seminary, I always read.  But, I didn't like my teacher telling me what I had to read (surprise, surprise), so I always went back to just reading the Book of Mormon.  Haha, I got all the way through Exodus in the Old Testament, Acts in the New Testament, and maybe 1/3 of the way through D&C in all of my years in seminary.  This time is giving me the opportunity to catch up on the other scriptures that I previously neglected.  This crazy amount of studying will be a huge blessing, God has to have a purpose behind it.

During my many hours of studying, I came across a cool idea.  Christ performed the Atonement for us.  This is the most wonderful gift.  Through it, we can receive more happiness in this life and have all of the blessings and promises of joy in the life to come.  But, what do we have to do to utilize the Atonement?  Essentially, we must keep the commandments--do the things that Christ has asked us to do.  Okay, so that's logical.  Christ sets the stipulations that we must follow to use His gift to us.  What are these commandments?  They are things that we do in life that bring us happiness, not just because they allow us to utilize the Atonement, but because they are just generally good things to do.  So basically, Christ offers us complete happiness for the price of us being willing to do things that will make us happy.  That seems like a pretty good deal to me.

The several days that we were able to leave the apartment for a couple hours, we visited members and less-actives.  We're starting to create better relations with people and are seeing some changes in the ward.  There were actually seven less-active members at church yesterday, several of which we had visited.  That was exciting.  Haha, church is very interesting though.  Our ward is rather...apostate.  The most apostate ward in the mission, according to President Roney.  Yesterday our bishop, probably the only 100% doctrinally sound member, was out of town.  We've got some work to do. Oh the stories I could tell...  All of our investigators besides Chan Than either moved or left on a two month vacation last week.  This will probably be a blessing, we can focus on the ward.

Things are great, I love my mission.  Thanks for all of you and the love and support that I feel.  The church is true and we're so blessed to be a part of it.  I love being a missionary.

Je t'aime,

Soeur Alisa Hulme