December 13

Dear Family,

Another great week! This week had some good and some bad, but all in all good. First good news, we had a baptism. It was a girl of a less active family we’ve been working on activating, so hopefully this will be a good motivation for them to come back to church. There are soooo many inactive families here, and they all have rather petty reasons for leaving the church and most of them tell us they want to come back to church. I totally wish I had 25-40 hour days, especially Saturday, to pass by all of them and motivate them to come back, because all they need is a nice little kickstart and they’ll come back. We’ve also been trying this idea of doing a few FHEs on weeknights and inviting the less actives and investigators to those so they make friends with the members and have a reason to come on Sunday. That’s actually been working pretty well and we have a family who is coming back to activity because of it. Neat, huh?

Bad news. Freddy made it 2 and a half weeks without drinking, but on Friday after work his friends all invited him and he caved. Incidentally, we had scheduled an appointment with him that night and he showed up super late and pretty out of it. I have to admit, I was pretty disappointed. He was our golden investigator and every time we taught him I imagined him in the future as a bishop or something because he was so good and progressed so well. That experience made me think a lot about how Heavenly Father must feel when we do something stupid like blatantly disobey him. Not mad at all, just disappointed because our actions limited our future opportunities. He sadly watches as we paint ourselves into a corner, captive to our own choices. Luckily, there is a way out. There is always a way out. Long, perhaps; difficult, probably; worth it, certainly. Faith and Repentance are always an option, no matter how far into the corner we go. The next day we talked with Freddy and he felt so bad for what he had done. He recognized how he had been disobedient and the consequences and he felt determined to not make the same mistake again. He is now even more resolute to change his life and not fall again. He told us that falling made him see how bad it was before and how much he wants to change and he is going strong again. A great lesson for him and me.

I love you all tons and pray for you all. The church is true!

Elder Spencer