Overcome with Love

 (Elder Slade)

To the best friends and family a person can hope for!

The Lord keeps blessing us so abundantly, it's hard to take it all in. We put 2 more people on-date for baptism this week. We put a 15 year old girl named Kaiden on date for March 27. She is so prepared and has such a strong testimony. We also found a new person to teach named Natalie who turns 9 next month. She has it the desire to be baptized as well, so we set a baptismal date of May 22 for her! We also found one other girl to teach named Nikiyah. We are basically teaching an army of kids and youth. It's pretty epic! What keeps me going though is if I can't just teach these kids one principle, that will help them in their life, help them to be a bit happier, then I have succeeded. I hope the things we teach them will change the rest of their lives.

Some other highlights this week, was that a woman we are teaching named Laticia made it to church for the first time this Sunday! Laticia has a minor case of Schizophrenia, but every time we go over to teach her, she says she read the Book of Mormon, and really enjoyed it! She uttered her first prayer this week in a lesson as well! She has had some cool spiritual experiences!

I also just wanted to share some impressions I had this morning as I said my morning prayer. As I prayed, I just felt an overwhelming sense and feeling of love from, and love for God. These past 13 months have definitely not been easy, but I've seen the Lord's hands so many times in these months. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have been constants through out it. They have been me strength and comfort. They have helped me change, to become a better person, and have blessed me and others in an innumerable amount of ways. Truly everything we have is from God, and comes out of his love and mercy for us. I am so happy God has allowed me to have this experience of serving a mission!

Love you all!

Pictures:

1. There's a squirrel in our back yard named "Chonkers". This is a trap we made to try to catch it. We put some of our leftovers underneath it.

2. A giant picture of Christ in our apartment.