A First Prayer

I sense a lot of redundancy in my letters each week, so I would first like to apologize for that! I try to make them unique, but that is quite challenging because we do exactly the same thing every week and every day! Sometimes it is difficult for me to think of how to express my feelings towards the past week. I thank all who read these letters, because it must be painfully boring at times!

Stake Conference was this weekend, so Elder Ronnenberg and I were extremely busy this week preparing our investigators and helping them make it to the meeting. We had 6 people actually show up to the service, which is a decent amount, but at the same time I feel like we could have gotten about 10 people there. Every time someone walked through the door I got a huge smile on my face because I knew without a doubt that they were going to feel the spirit in that meeting! The church building was extremely full! The missionaries were in charge of counting all of the people in the building and they all reported their numbers to me at the end - We had 1080 people attend the Sunday session of stake conference, that is pretty amazing! The only time that I have seen more people at Stake Conference was in Mesa and that is just insane down there! haha

We had a really neat experience with Keith this week! We were able to teach him twice and the first time was really exciting for us because we went into the lesson expecting him to finally say the prayer like he promised us that he would. Right when we sat down he said, " I don't feel like saying the prayer today." That was pretty depressing, but Elder Ronnenberg and I knew that he needed to say a prayer in order to progress. Throughout the lesson we taught him why prayer was so important and how easy it was to do. We even asked him, "What are some things that you are thankful for? What would you ask your Father in Heaven to help you with in a prayer?" After we asked him those questions and read Enos chapter 1 with him his heart was softened towards the idea. At the end of the lesson we told him, " you basically already said a prayer just by telling us what you were thankful for and what you needed, so now just plug those things into the way we begin and end the prayer." He still wasn't quite there, but then I said, " We are going to close our eyes and you go ahead and say the prayer." And he did it! This was such a HUGE step for him! He said a beautiful prayer that was perfectly constructed and afterwards he looked over to his wife (who is a member of the church) and she was crying a lot! She had never heard him pray before and they have been married for 27 years!

The second time we met with him was at the Visitor's Center! Keith wanted to go see the Joseph Smith movie and it was his idea that we all go down there together. We watched the movie and afterwards talked about baptism and why it is so important for him. Then we simply invited him to be baptized on April 14th. He told us " I am going to have to think about that one." Which is great because that is exactly what he said the first time we invited him to pray. I feel like his answer to "think about it" was much more sincere than a lot of people who just say yes to that invitation. What a great couple of teaching appointments this week!

I love my mission! I am learning and growing in the ways of the Lord!

 I reason I should be a chef?

-Elder Thomas