Moving mountains... of bricks & a personal witness

Hello everyone!! :) Man this week just flew by! It seems like it was just yesterday that I was writing all of you and letting you know how my week was!! haha Well I don't have a ton of new stuff to tell you this week, but I do have some fun things and a cool experience I had this week! First of all I want to talk about the service project that I was able to do this week! So there is a family that is in our ward the their names are the Gasols, and this week they were moving houses and asked us if we could come in the morning and help them move some stuff to prepare to live in their new house. So of course we were all about it! We told some of the other companionships about it and so the next morning we showed up to their new house and to our wonderful surprise, the front of their house was almost completely hidden by bricks haha. They explained to us that we needed to move ALL of the bricks over to the side of the house where they could be out of the way... so we got to it!! haha We thought that we would only be there for an hour or so, but this turned out to be an all day project haha. I can't even explain to you all how tired I was at the end of the day! My arms have never been so sore in my entire life, but it was so cool to be able to see at the end of the day that we had moved these couple thousand bricks out of the way so that they could be able to get into their new house! :) I sun blocked before I went, but only once so my arms took a bit of a beating by the sun! Even though they are still quite sensitive, it just reminds me of how hard we worked and how much fun it was! :)

Ok, so the other big news this week is I killed one of my companions this week!! haha I crack myself up :) For those of you who don't know missionary lingo, to kill your comp just means that you are the one that finishes his mission with him! So yeah, one of my companions finished this last Tuesday! It was super weird to see him go, but I was not jealous at all! In fact, it was the exact opposite! He was the one that was super jealous of me! And for good reason too! This is the best mission in the world! Anyway, I am down to just one companion now and we will be with each other for this transfer and then he will probably be heading somewhere else.

As far as investigators go, we have a new one and her name is Rani! She is the mom of Rina and she has learned before but stopped learning all of the sudden. Well, we started talking to her and gained a good relationship and then asked her if she would be willing to take the discussions again and she agree to do so! We are super excited because she already has an amazing testimony and she has told us that she knows the Book of Mormon is true. She just is nervous to progress forward, but we are excited to be able to help her along and find friends in the Church who can help her along as well!

For my spiritual experience... this week I finished reading the Book of Mormon! I have read the Book of Mormon as a family before, but it was not until this week that I could truthfully say that I had read the Book of Mormon front to back. As most everyone knows, at the end of the Book of Mormon Moroni gives a promise that if you pray to the Father and ask Him if this book is not true, that He will manifest the truth of it unto you through the Holy Ghost. Well, I have always known that the Book of Mormon was true because I have had many experiences throughout my life that have confirmed its truthfulness, but up until this point in my life I could not say that I had a true testimony of the promise of Moroni! Well, I decided to take him up on his promise and I went to the very top of our house on the roof and there I knelt down and started to ask my Heavenly Father if the book of scripture that I had just read was true. Before I could even get the words that I wanted to say out of my mouth, I was overcome by the Spirit and I could feel of His warmth and His love that He had for me. It was such an amazing experience and it is something I will never be able to forget.

Today I want you all to know that I know that the Book of Mormon is the word of God. I know that we have a Heavenly Father who loves us so much and because He loves us so much, He gave us a plan and a way to return back into His presence. I know that God calls prophets at this time just as in times of old, and that through His prophet Joseph Smith we have been given the Book of Mormon. I know that this is a book written from prophets of old testifying of our time, the time that we are living in right now! I know it's true. And even better than that, I know that everyone who reads this letter can know that it's true as well if they are willing to have an open heart and read and have a desire to know if what they are reading is true. I know if ANY person reads the Book of Mormon with a desire to know if it's true, they WILL receive an answer from Heavenly Father through the power of the Holy Ghost! What a gift God has given us!! He does not ask us to follow blind!! He has given us the Holy Ghost as a guide and a comforter to know that we are on the right path! I know you will be able to feel its presence close in your life if you listen to the teachings the Book of Mormon has to share and listen to the message that the Missionaries have to share! I know that the message is from God! I am so blessed and thankful that Heavenly Father trusts me with this great responsibility!! I am forever indebted to Him for the wonderful blessings and trials He has given to me on my mission so far! I love my mission! Every wonderful and hard thing about it! Thank you all for all of your love and support!!

Until next week! All my love!
Elder Steadman