"Jesus Christ lives and has been lifting me up"

May 21, 2012

Hi Everyone! We had a great week this last week. So much has happened, especially yesterday. We had two people walk in from outside. This branch has had more walk-in's than I have ever seen before. The first one's name is Ken. He has been in religious seminary and tutoring and has even preached sermons. But he is super super open. In fact, he says he is attracted more to the way our church does things because we focus so much on families, and we focus on developing individual relationships and personal ministering.
Other churches focus more on just preaching a sermon. His parents have died and he is forty years old. He is unmarried with no kids and has no family that live close by. He says it is a sore spot for him because families are so important to him. He is very friendly and outgoing. The ward members instantly fellowshipped him. We are going to see him during the week. We also had a homeless man named Niles that came in. I had a Book of Mormon with my testimony in it and I gave it to him. I hope he reads it and gets something from my testimony.

Elizabeth C gave a talk in sacrament meeting about what it means to her to be a daughter of God. She was really nervous, but she did really well. As they announced that, they said that Jamie's turn will come in a few weeks. They are both doing so well. When we were in Gospel principles, we were teaching about the Plan of Salvation because that is what we felt that Ken needed to hear. Elder Pearce asked Jamie to bear her testimony. She talked about how she felt peace when we were teaching her and that she knew that it was the
right decision for her to get baptized. Jason came to church too, and we were worried that he would disrupt the spirit with all of his off topic questions during the Gospel Principles class, but Brother V was just having a conversation down the hall with him. Jason loves to talk so much that he will completely forget about anything else. That way the class could continue on.

The last three Sundays in Elder's Quorum, they have been focusing on the less active member rescue effort. The ward has about two hundred families on the list, and there are now only 17 names that the ward doesn't have a status update on, which is really good. We are really excited about how the ward is trying to rescue all of these people. They found one less active family named the C family. They have two children who aren't baptized yet and they would like the missionaries to come and teach them. But before they do, they
want to come to the church at least once. They will be coming to church this week. We are really excited.

Also, Gaelle and Oliver went to mutual. They had combined volleyball with the Young Men and the Young Women's. We usually go to the church at 7:30 to see the Daily Dose English class. We went to see them for a second, and then we went to see how the youth were doing. We saw Elizabeth, Gaelle, and Oliver out there. They were all happy and involved. Also, Jamie was there because she is the Young Woman's secretary. They asked us to play with them, so we did that for 20 minutes. It was a lot of fun and we were able to talk to our recent converts and investigators. We are so grateful that all four of them were there. We went back to the English class and it had just barely gotten out. We talked with Berta, one of our investigators. She is struggling to find a job. She also has a lot of health problems, but she can't pay for bills to get a sonogram and other tests and treatments done. We really hope she is able to get what she needs done. We also talked to Marius. He didn't say much to us. He was on the phone. He didn't seem as excited to see us as usual, so we were wondering what happened. We invited both of them to come to the branch activity this last Saturday, and they both accepted. It was going to be a picnic at the park, but it got cancelled because of the rain.

We had so much rain, thunder, and lightning this week. We still had 17 lessons, but the weather ruined some of our plans. We spent quite a bit of time indoors. We had one day where is rained so hard that we were soaked from head to foot and our shoes were full of water and completely drenched. They finally finished drying out yesterday. But then yesterday with our dry pair of shoes, it rained so hard that the same thing happened. There are some pictures that I will send to you today.

We had a zone harvest yesterday from 5:30 to 7:30 and we found five families: 1-S 2- Marcos (Brazilian man who has a date!) 3- Paige and Kim 4- M (nicknamed Val) and 5- Shari, Jim, and Alex. We actually continued after 7:30 to find the last family, because we decided to spend the rest of the time harvesting. It was amazing. And it was also amazing the night before Elder Pearce got very sick and we didn't think he could even bike. He decided even though he felt like throwing up, we would go out. I am so glad we did. As we went out, he started feeling better and by the time we got up to our spot, he felt completely healed as far as I could tell. He didn't say anything else about his sickness. It was amazing.

Well, I need to go! I know that Jesus Christ lives and that he has been lifting me up and will continue to do so until the very end. I love you all so much!

Bye!

Love,

Elder Seamons

Hi President! We are doing really well.

We had a zone harvest yesterday from 5:30 to 7:30 and we experienced the power of being guided by revelation to where we need to be. We prayed about where we should go. We threw out different suggestions beforehand, but when the time came, we both felt impressed on the same place. As we followed the spirit and were persistent, we found amazing people. One of them was someone that I had met
five months previous in a completely different area far away from where we were harvesting. But she had moved and she was happy to see me. I am grateful that Elder Pearce listened to the spirit and suggested that we knocked on that door. We also found a family who really needed more of God in their life: Shari, Alex and Jim. It was not a coincidence that we met them.

Well President, Thank you so much for the letter you sent to me a few days ago. It really provided me with the comfort and assurance that I need now to finish strong  to the end. I love you so much!

Love,

Elder Seamons