Miracles

Hello family :) Well, I hope you have all had a good week this week! It has definitely been one of the best weeks of my mission! Definitely a week filled with lots of emotions!! Ha anyways so this week church was awesome! We were hoping to have some investigators come to church this Sunday because like I said a little bit in my last letter and the one before that, our investigators have not really been coming to church, which has been kind of hard. But this week I felt pretty good about them coming to church and when we got there all but 2 of them were there!! I was super excited and felt like a lot of our hard work these last couple weeks had paid off!! Not only that, but when we got to the church, there was also a person who came who was not yet an investigator! He showed up because he wanted to learn more about Jesus and so now we have another new investigator!! Then we had a Preach My Gospel class after church ended and I was the teacher! It was super fun! We memorized the first vision! It took us forever and a year but we did it! I think we must have said it 200 times in all, but it was pretty cool by the end of the class to hear 12 of our young members recite such a sacred experience, not to mention probably one of the greatest and most significant moments in all of history!! Pretty cool stuff we are accomplishing over here in Cambodia! Also, after church one of my investigators had some pretty good news for me!! He has 3 friends that he goes to school with who also want to learn about Jesus, so today we are going to be going and teaching them in the evening… so that's awesome as well!! Overall this Sunday was an awesome day!!:)

I have one more story for you guys this week! This is not going to be a terribly long letter!! Sorry! So this week I called one of my investigators to meet with her and when she answered the phone and I asked her if she could make some time to learn with us that evening, she told me that she was going to have to stop learning with us because her husband did not want to learn with us anymore. I guess after we taught him about the Word of Wisdom he was positive that he would not be able to stop drinking coffee and tea so he told his wife to tell us that they were not going to be learning with us anymore! When she told me that my heart just dropped! I begged her to just let us come over one more time and she finally accepted! When we went over that night we met with her and her husband. When we got there, he immediately started to express his concerns with not being able to obey the Word of Wisdom. He said and that he believed in God already and that is all that’s important is that he believes in God in his heart and that is good enough! As he was talking, I was trying my very best to just listen to him speak and not worry about what I was going to say and just have the faith that whatever I needed to say, Heavenly Father would give it to me in the time that I needed it! Well, when he finished talking I thought for just a second and then I looked at him and I asked him if he had prayed about Joseph Smith. I didn't address anything that he had just recently shared with me; for some reason I felt like that was not what I needed to ask him! Rather I asked him if he had prayed and asked if Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God. He told me that he had not yet done this. I then went on to explain to him that the Word of Wisdom will be something that is next to impossible to obey and will be something that is frustrating and annoying in his life if he does not yet have faith in Joseph Smith… because he is the reason why we have the Word of Wisdom! Through the prophet Joseph Smith we received the Word of Wisdom from God, but if he had not prayed to know if Joseph Smith was a true prophet then it would be impossible to have faith that the Word of Wisdom comes from God as well! I asked him if we could come to his house again the next day and bring the movie of Joseph Smith and his life so he could see himself in a story-like mode, the history of Joseph Smith. Reluctantly he agreed! We went over the next day and watched the movie with him and the Spirit was definitely present! I testified to him after that I was a representative of Jesus Christ and that I knew that everything that Joseph Smith said he saw he really did see! The Spirit was so strong and I could tell that both of them were feeling the Spirit as well!! He still has some fears with obeying the Word of Wisdom, but he has agreed that he will continue to learn with us! When he said this, I was so glad that he was willing to open his heart back up and keep on learning! It truly was a miracle! It was so cool! I felt so lucky that Heavenly Father also gave me the words to speak that would touch him in a way that he would want to keep on learning!

This week has been such a good week! I feel better than I have in a really long time and I love that I feel like I have the Spirit with me all of the time and it feels so very good!! I don't know what the future holds for me as well as I did before, but I feel so at peace with where I stand with my Heavenly Father this week!! I ask this week especially that you all keep me in your prayers!! I can feel all of your prayers each week lifting me up and helping me keep on going! Thank you all so much for your support! You will never know just how much it means to me!!

All the love I possess!!
Elder Steadman:)