Sam got baptized! woot! It was so awesome! She was so happy and so excited! She got baptized on 11/11/11 and it was also remembrance day in Canada (US has Veteran's day). So that day we went 2 hours early to go fill up the font. We start to fill it up and it's ice cold. I mean ICE cold. The St. John river would have been warmer. The heater is broken, so we grab an older member that happened to be in the building and he got us a ladder to get to the attic. So here we are in our skirts climbing this huge ladder to get to the attic. We try reseting the water heater and it's still not working. The clock is ticking and I'm thinking there is no way we could let someone go into something so cold! So we head over to the mother's lounge to fill up hot water into buckets and transfer the buckets to the font. The old fashioned way, you know. A member of the bishopric came to fix it and by the time Sam got there it was fixed. However there wasn't time to fill it up with hot water so it was more like kind of cold instead of freezing. When we told Sam about it all she responded with, "Even if it had been freezing I would have jumped in!" The baptism went smoothly from there on out. She did get out and mention that we could check baptism and polar dip on the bucket list though. :) So I guess it wasn't as warm as I thought.

      I can't express the joy I felt just witnessing this awesome baptism! This girl seriously is icredible. I've never seen such enthusiasm for the gospel not even from members. It's nuts! She kept thanking us for everything and even said, "I couldn't have done it without you." I laughed really hard at that and said, "ya, actually you could have!" We all looked at eachother and laughed thinking, ya that's true. Seriously she had been so prepared by our Heavenly Father.

     Yesterday our lesson with Elaine was awesome! Elaine is from China, she's the one that fed us all that good Chinese food. Elaine is so cool because she does this whole reflective listening thing. When we're done talking about a subject she will recap what we've told her in her own words and then recap what she needs to do. She shared this really cool experience with us too! She said that last week after we taught her how to pray she thought she would pray to ask for help on her test the next day. So before she went to bed that's what she did. Then as she was lying in bed she had this feeling that she should look over her notes from a lab she had that week. So she got out of bed and reviewed her notes. Then when she went to the test the next day there were only 3 questions on the whole test and one of them was all about that lab that she had felt prompted to study! How cool is that?! After telling us this she told us that she wasn't sure if she was just lucky or if God had helped her. We explained that God helped her and that the Holy Ghost gave her that feeling. She looked at us and smiled and said that she believed that it was God too. Then she looked puzzled and said, "but why would God help me? I've only been learning about Him for 2 weeks, He should help you guys more than me because you know more about Him." This was my favorite part of the lesson because then I got to explain how much God loves her and that He loves her just as much as He loves me and because God loves her He will answer her. I told her that God had been with her, her whole life, she just didn't know it was Him. ah! Chinese people are so cool! I love teaching them this basic, simple, yet HUGE principle, God is our loving Heavenly Father. Never has that principle meant so much to me as it does now! I've taken this information for granted for way too long.

     I'm so grateful for all of these wonderful experiences. I feel like that's all my letters home say now. But it's so true and I could never repay my Heavenly Father for being a witness to so many wonderful blessings. I'll forever be grateful for a loving Father in Heaven who has helped me endure so that I could make it to this point and see these blessings. I'm so grateful that God knows more than I do and sees so clearly my future. I hope that I can trust in Him more throughout my life because of the experiences I've had here.

 

Love,

Sister Crane