Email October 6, 2014

Hello. :) I hope you guys all had a fantastic week! And especially weekend!!! GOODNESS isn't conference amazing?! I just love hearing from God's chosen prophets and apostles and leaders. They are so inspiring and uplifting and edifying. And I'm using really bad grammar. But that's okay. :) I think my personal favorite was the talk given by Jorge Klemingbot, or however you spell it. He talked about gaining spiritual confidence and boy did he give some great tools to building it! There were so many amazing one-liners that I loved and he talked so fast that I could hardly write a whole thought/quote/sentence down before needing to start the next one. But it was great. I can't wait to go back and re-read a lot of those talks. They're just...amazing. So as for the rest of the week: We picked up a new investigator from the former investigator list! :D He was working with missionaries in the past before but for some reason they dropped him...we're not sure why. He is a little slow, but I don't think he has any mental handicaps. But we started right into everything and he was totally up to us coming back over and doing the discussions with him. He asked us a few questions about the church's history, the history of the Book of Mormon, and the discussions. He has a few other setbacks having to deal with family and depression, but we know that he can work through them and we're excited for him. He accepted a soft baptismal commitment (to be baptized) but we haven't set a specific date with him yet. We have prayed about it and have a day in mind, but we haven't asked him about it yet. But we're excited to keep working with him! We kept working with Fernando. I think I told the story about how we dumped out all his beer, had him pray with us for strength to fight off the temptation to drink, and gave him a blessing a few weeks ago. We finally were able to see him again this week. *Drum roll* He hasn't drunk since we gave him the blessing!!! This man who couldn't put a handful of days of sobriety together has been free of it for over two weeks!!! If there isn't power in priesthood blessings, I don't know what power is! The power of God is real. I know it. He accepted a soft baptismal invitation and has great promise to make it there. During weekly planning we prayerfully set a date for him as well and just have to invite him to work toward it. We are looking forward to working with both of them! :D Some of our other investigators have been progressing, but very slowly so not much to report. We are still working with Jennifer, but slower. She is going through a really rough time and has been working through it so we haven't been able to contact her, but that's okay because we will be able to soon. Brother Fisk called us during conference and was struggling really bad. Really bad. So we immediately went over and saw him. He was drunk again which was super sad because he had been clean for a month. But he apparently got in a fight with his mom and she left and his sister called the cops on him because apparently the fight was pretty bad. So he was struggling really bad. But we were able to talk to him and I think we were able to knock some sense into him, even though he was pretty drunk. It was actually kinda cool to see him take optimism from our words. I don't know if that made sense, but it was cool. And he was doing better the next day we stopped by. We are stopping by daily now to check up haha. Well, that's about it for this week. Everything is going great!!! :) I love you guys and challenge you all to take your favorite conference talk and apply the principles of it in your life. I know that if you do, you will be happier, more peaceful, and find more comfort in life even in the trials. I know it. Love you guys and wish you the best week ever! Love, Elder Cevering :)