Trust in His word

Dear friends and family:

"The Fort Lauderdale Temple dedication marks the first time that the Church is broadcasting a cultural celebration live and on the internet. This means that anyone with a computer or device with internet access can watch and enjoy the cultural celebration next Saturday. Make sure your families and investigators have an opportunity to watch it.

Next Saturday, May 3, 2014 at 7:00 pm EST (be thoughtful of the time difference), the cultural celebration will be broadcast live on the internet at:

www.lds.org/broadcasts/languages/florida-cultural-celebration/2014/04." (President Anderson)

"Mothers Day is in two weeks, Sunday, the 11th of May. You will have permission to call home that day with a 30 minute time limit. You may use Skype if it is not an inconvenience to members. [...] Please organize this appropriately with your family." (President Anderson) I have no idea what time we will be calling or skyping.

Elder Van Wagenen and I are very excited for the temple dedication and everything that will be happening in the near future! We have had a great week. We received many new great investigators, and we are very excited to keep teaching them and finding new people to teach.

Unfortunately, all of the people we are teaching didn't show up at church. It was very anticlimactic, considering that we were expecting 8+ people to come. But as it turns out, most of our investigators had good reasons they didn't come, so they're still cool, and they're still preparing to be baptized on the 18th. For example, Yoline (who we found on Wednesday, and who is very excited to read and to come to church) was kidnapped by her family the night before, because they didn't want her to come. There was a lot of miscommunication with other investigators as well. We'll make sure we do better in the future with getting everything prepared and cleared up long beforehand.

I have a hard time believing that we'll get a lot of investigators in sacrament meeting this week. The biggest reason I feel this way is that we won't even have church this week. We'll have the dedication!

This week, we had a pretty funny experience. It seems trivial, but you can learn an important lesson from it.

We talked with a person and asked him if he wanted us to come and leave a blessing in his home. He agreed, and he gave us the address. The apartment number was 2317. The next day, we went to building 2, floor 3, and we started walking down the hall. We got to rooms 2311 and 2312, and we could see already that there were only four doors left. There wouldn't be a 2317. But we kept walking, trusting that that the man wouldn't have given us an address that doesn't exist. As it turns out, that apartment building skipped #2313. So #2317 was the very last room. We entered and left the blessing, and he and his wife are preparing to be baptized.

I compared that to our faith in Jesus Christ. Even when we look forward and think that there's no possible way for things to work out, we just need to continue and trust in his word. If we had turned around when we realized that he had given us a "fake address", we would never have seen them again, and we would have missed out on blessings!

Thanks,

Elder Slade