Graduation Party!!

Zone Leader Council

Hola Familia! 

How are you today?  I'm doing awesome, and it's been a good week.  Finals was this week and Graduation was Saturday.  The Institute will be getting smaller, but it will still go on.  We might pick up another ward for work.  We'll see.  This week we had some awesome things happen.

First, we taught Becky twice, and then she left on Friday, and so now she is in the Denver South mission.  Both lessons were great, we made sure we had taught her everything, and we shared testimonies.  She is going to get baptized, and she is so solid.  She has such a strong testimony and has gotten so many answers to prayers.  I'm so glad I had the opportunity to teach her and see her grow so much.  We taught Catherine as well this week, and she is doing great! She is set to be baptized May 19th still.  Sam will baptize her which will be awesome!  I don't know if I told you, but Sam received the Aaronic Priesthood last Sunday and he asked me to give that to him.  It was a way cool experience, one that I hadn't had the chance to do before.

I don't know if I told you about the other Sam yet, but last week we taught a guy named Sam Erickson, who was a contact by the missionary here that I replaced. He taught him while Elder Dodd was on exchanges, and then we didn't hear from him for a while.  Last week we finally set up an appointment.  He told us he was agnostic, and didn't really know what to believe.  We taught him the first lesson, and it went really well.  He said he would read the Book of Mormon and pray to know if it was true.  Well we taught him this week on Friday, and I was definitely not expecting what happened.  We started talking, and we asked him if he read and prayed.  He told us he hadn't had a chance to read yet because of finals, but he did pray.  He said one night he was just struggling to know how to approach a certain issue that had come up, and he thought for a while and then prayed.  He said that when he prayed he felt this overwhelming feeling come over him that was hard to describe, but he said it gave him clarity as to how he needed to approach this problem and what kind of attitude he needed to have. We read Galatians 5 with him about the fruits of the Spirit, and he said that he felt this comfort, joy, and peace like he never had before.  He said he was almost to the point of tears--which is extremely unusual for him.  It was such a testimony of prayer.  I then asked him, "So where is your belief now?"  He then said, "I believe in God".  It was so amazing and I couldn't really realize the weight of how awesome it was until after, but it was a stunning and real testimony to me of the truth of what we teach. Sam left on Saturday to go work for the summer in a small town East of San Diego, but he is planning on reading the Book of Mormon. Baptism has been on his mind, and he said he is a little afraid of the commitment and change he would have to make, but it is on his mind and he knows he needs to pursue this.  Awesome!

This week my testimony is that of deep love and charity.  I can't tell you how much I have learned about those things in the past 4 weeks.  It's amazing how much the Lord can give you situations that try you and test you, but help you grow and strengthen your testimony so immensely.  There is no greater gift you can give than charity, and we will be blessed so much by it as well. Pray for it, and find a way to give that gift to someone--the gift of love, forgiveness, acceptance, comfort, the gift of charity.

I love you so much,

Elder Logan Bryan