Following The Spirit

Hello Jared,                                                                  10/17/2011

Another week has flown by! It seems to be going crazy fast.

KSL did come to Spanky's on Monday. They stayed for two hours to get a lot of footage. Kalynn did a good interview. The story turned out nice and I even made my television debut! There I am in the background just working away. I hear they are going to follow her into surgery and do a full story about the outcome. She goes in on Tuesday for the surgery.

The Reich's came home from their mission in Peru. They spoke in church yesterday and gave a fantastic report. They told us how poor the people are there, how they had to baptize in the ocean and how many people joined the church while they were there. It was a really neat meeting. Even Taylor and Mikayla paid attention.

I spent three days last week up at Camp Tracy for a  Boy Scout leadership training, called WoodBadge. It helps to train leaders to teach and strengthen the youth. They divided us up into patrols, six in each one. In my patrol, one guy grew up in Vernal, graduated from Uintah High, and knows some of my family. Another guy, in his twenties, served his mission in New Zealand, like dad. One lives in Draper and knows Marion. Another served in New Zealand, but was much older, come to find out....he was your Dad's mission companion!  And a guy in the patrol next to me lives by Uncle Vaughn. Just goes to show, you should always behave. You NEVER know who you're going to run into. It has been interesting. I will go back this week for three more days, so it has been really time consuming, but hopefully worth it in the end. 

Just as I suspected, the boys have been going through fuel like there's no tomorrow. When I got home Saturday night and got the report of what happened while I was away, the girls told me they ran into the Clayton's at the gas pump. Interesting, since they just filled up right before I left two days before. Taylor happened to mention that he and Dad went and got a pizza for dinner. He didn't bother to say where. Come to find out, they went to Bear Lake to get the pizza. Seriously? But wait...there's more. They found a little straight road and dad let Taylor "open it up". You guessed it. Taylor got his high speed record...107! These boys should not be left unattended. I'm not sure what to do, knowing I will be gone for another three days. "When Mom's away, the boys will play." I may have to hire a nanny to keep the boys out of trouble!

We got two more foreign exchange students, Yui and Ching, from Taiwan. They are really cute girls and speak English quite well. They are happy and excited to be here. They are going to cook dinner for us tonight. They are most excited to see snow and to experience Halloween. It's cute to see how excited they are.

I hope you got your package. I know it's not much, but I didn't really know what to get you that wouldn't be a headache to carry around the rest of your mission. If you need or want anything else, just let me know. I hope you have a great birthday! If you were still in Plainfield, I would call Sister Melton and have her bake you a cake, but since I have lost my only connection, you are out of luck. I thought about sending one, but that seemed disastrous. Just know that we are thinking about you, praying for you and wishing you a super HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

One year older and Wiser too. Happy Birthday to you!

Love,

Mom



Hello,

All our hard work from last week has paid off. we had a really busy week. It's a little bit sad though. Elder Empey's travel plans have been finalized. He's traveling down to the mission home on Halloween day and flying home on the 1st. 

I got some news from Elder Bair in Plainfield today. On my last night with Elder Bair he came down with a bad case of Influenza. Him and his new companion have been pretty sick the past few weeks. I got out of there just in time. :) He gave me some good news and some bad news. Good news is, Jessica is getting baptized on November 1st. It's really exciting! She's awesome. Bad news is... The last lesson I had with Bob he told us he was doing some research on the internet and....got into anti information about Joseph Smith's "33 secret wives". Apparently now he's dropped the elders and doesn't really want anything to do with the church anymore. It breaks my heart. He was doing so well. Hopefully in the future some other elders can bring him back. The ward really loved him and I really love him.

Anyways...back to Fort Wayne. We had a really cool experience this week. As we were planning one night we were planning backup plans for a set appointment we had the next day. We planned four or five people and then after we were done planning that night I thought of someone else in the area we could try by. It was a family that was having some problems and told Elder Empey and his former companion not to come by anymore until they called back after things cooled down. We put them on the very last "well, we'll see them if nobody else is home" backup. Well, the next day we went for our scheduled appointment. We knocked a few times and could see her in the house. She didn't answer. So we moved on to the next family. We were sure they would answer because both of their cars were there. They had to be home. Their five year old daughter answered the door, and when we asked if her parents were there she looked behind the door for a few seconds like someone was talking to her, and then she looked back at us, said "no" and shut the door. It was a little odd, but we decided to move on to our next plan.  The next three people we tried didn't answer. We were on to our final plan of the family that told Elder Empey not to stop by anymore. We showed up and when we knocked on the door we got a nice warm "Come on in!" They were excited to see us. They told us, "it's really funny that you stopped by just now because Anna was just thinking about calling you back and having you come over again so she can get baptized." (This is where my jaw hit the floor.)

This was a really neat experience that showed me how the spirit works. We were inspired to plan to see them, and I'm pretty sure the people we had planned to see first were prompted to not let us in. I know we were supposed to see this family and we were guided to see them.

Neat stuff.

Love you,

Jared