Email January 12, 2015

Heyo family! Hopefully you have all had a great week and hopefully you have another good one coming up! To jump right into the email, this week was pretty great! If you were to look at the numbers we got, you probably might not agree, but really it was a good week. We were finally able to make contact with a potentially golden investigator we have been trying to find/meet with since December. Booya! Also, we have gotten some referrals with good potential as well. And then we also have a lady who wants to raise her kids in the LDS church who went to 4 years of seminary and never got baptized whose husband wants to start coming back to church too. So many amazing things have been falling in our lap lately, it has been a huge blessing! Heavenly Father definitely looks out for His kids! Also, Elder Dixon and I have been working on this goal to start working with the members more closely and putting plans to how we are going to do it. We presented the idea to our ward council and suddenly things just fell into place! The stake youth theme fits in perfectly with missionary work and so they want to make it an entire ward theme, not just the youth's theme. We are going to be having a special meeting in the 3rd hour of church on February 1st to introduce the whole goal and plans to the ward and every auxiliary presidency is going to be trying to incorporate ways to help in their own auxiliaries and things worked out just sweet! It was so amazing to see the Spirit of the Lord work in the group. Some Ward Council members were saying everything that happened in the meeting was so inspired because our plan working perfectly into the youth theme working perfectly together to become a ward goal and theme was just brilliant. And I agree with them! The whole meeting was guided by the Lord, I felt it! Things just worked out and it all just fell into place. It was super awesome. I'm a little sad that I'll most likely not see the fruits of it in my labor here, but that's okay. As long as missionaries down the road keep going and that the ward keeps it up, then it will be an amazing program with huge success to follow. And then lastly was a really cool scripture I found this week. Maybe you all have already made this connection, but as I was reading in the Book of Mormon this week I read one of the many verses in which the Lord is telling us, "Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land." I have always looked at that temporally, that if we keep Heavenly Father's commandments He will prosper us in those things that we need temporally. But for some reason I thought about it in a more spiritual light as I reread the verse a few times. It came to mean to me that "Inasmuch as I shall keep the Lord's commandments, He shall prosper me in His land" - in the Celestial Kingdom! If I will do the best I can to keep the commandments and do what Jesus Christ would do and live how Heavenly Father wants me to live, I will be able prosper in the land - I will be able to have the most prosperous land in the history of ever: The Celestial Kingdom. I was like, "Ohhhhhh snap! Why haven't I ever seen that before?!" It was so cool. The scriptures are a huge blessing in our lives, I have definitely gained a great appreciation for how much we can learn through them, even in the most simple of verses. My testimony is this: I know Heavenly Father lives and that He is real. I know Jesus Christ is my Savior, my Redeemer, and one of my most recent favorite, my Reclaimer. I know the gospel is true. Not just because it has been taught to me and told to me over and over and over, but because I have lived it and I have pondered it and I have prayed about it. And I know and love that we can all have the same opportunity!!! Have a great week guys! I love you! Love, Elder Cevering