Luke's Letter June 8, 2009

Family and friends!

How is everyone! First of all thank you all for your emails!!! When I opened my mail today I had 16!!! Wowser!!! Thank you all so much I really really appreciate it. I can´t believe I have a new nephew! I am so excited, he looked so cute! Telly you looked wonderful holding baby Ben! I can´t wait to meet him!

Thank you starla for the funny stories about Emma, the one about the snorkiling mask was way funny cause I could just picture it in my mind, Silly girl about choked herself to death. Im so glad that you are helping out that family in your ward. It´s amazing how many blessings we overlook in our lives, but when we go and help others and really forget about ourselves and simply are trying to serve our brothers and sisters, we realize how blessed we really are.

I wanted to apologize for my email last week, I was in a frustrated mood when I sat down for email, and well, since I have the limited time to write I don´t think a lot about what I´m typuing and just kinda spew out all thats on my mind, and last week it was a little negative. My companion is feeling all better as of Wednesday, so we had about a week we didn´t do much, but now we are back in action. Its a little frustrating because we had appts with investigators we missed and now we´re having a hard time getting back in contact with them, but I know the Lord will set everything right. My companion really is a good guy, and we get along really pretty well. I´m quite thankful I have a companion like him, especially for my first one! Tomorrow we are doing a exchange cause he is going with the Zone Leader for some training, so its really scary for me bnecause the ZL´s comp is coming here with me... so I am going to be like leading us around to our appts and all that... my comp says its really weird because they don´t ever do that with people like me in their first 6 weeks. But I´m preparing for it and it should be interesting haha. It wil be a test for me on my spanish and juist general knowledge of our sector as well.

I´m sorry to hear about people graffiting the church at home, thats sad, there´s lots of graffiti hear, but I can´t understand any of it haha. But none is on the church cause its all fenced in and everything.

Well a couple stories from this week. First, we have an investigator named Kimberly, about 15 yrs old, who has 2 siblings who are recent converts, and she had a baptismal date but kinda backed out because of some problems, I´m not really sure what. But during an appointment we were talking and I> just feel like I understand what she´s going through, and I´m trying to talk with her about it but its hard with my language ability. Hopefully with time we can figure it out though. I think she knows this is the church, but she´s afraid to change, and she won´t pray about it because she already knows the answer. Or something like that, its sad but I think we can work with her and figure it out.

Also we still have a baptism planned for 10 yur old Sebastian Casas. This kid is a stud, He remembers stuff from the lessons better than any other investigator, adults and everything, and he really likes learning about the gospel. It helps that he has cousins and stuff that are strong members and help, but this kid is awesome. He´s going to be bnaptized the 20th. Hermana Flores and her soon to be husband are still waiting on papers til they can get married and her baptized but it should still be really soon.

Also this Sunday was fast Sunday of course, and we have the patriarch in our ward, but he has advanced cancer and is supposed to pass away in the next vouple months. He has an amazing testimony of course and is ok with his life and passing away and everything. But at church yesterday he was going up to bear his testimony and his strentgth gave out at the stairs, so people ran to catch him and get him back to his seat, then they brought him a microphone and he bore a very strong testimony. It was quite a spiritual experience.

We also had a really funny thing happen the other day while out knocking doors, we knocked a door, then a guy came out asking who it was, we told him the missionaries, and he crossed his index fingers at us, making a cross, and starting saying ¨Satanás Satanás fuera fuera¨ It was funny, I couldn´t help but laugh.

So dad you are going to do full time trading you think? I barely got all the dearelders last week haha. That soudns like you´ll enjoy that, let me know how it goes, oh, and could you email me that P90X ab workout thing? That´d be great, thank you.

I don´t have any more time to write, sorry, but everything is fine here. I´ve almost been here a month! Crazy huh? It feels like a long time, but also short, I dunno, its weird. But I love you all and can´t wait to meet baby ben. Thank you for the prayers and everything, they mean a lot and help a lot. You wouldn´t believe the blessings I´ve received out here and how powerful prayer really is. I find myself praying for more things everyday. Thank you again and I love you!!!

Elder Skene.

ps, do you send this to Jason? I need his email address too.