May 24, 2011

Hey her's some picutres. There's one with me and a sister and an elder. Thats Siter Riley and Elder Heap. We're all from San Diego. The missionary with me and the graffiti is Elder Hansen. The other is the baptism. Elder Marsden is the missionary on the far right. Mike is the dad and Nick is his son/

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Keith Madsen wrote:

Hey everybody!



Well, the three leg is awesome! We are having a blast! Elder marsden is from Idaho Falls, ID. He came out in August 2009 but got really sick and went home for over a year. He already served 10 months so he only has 14 months to go. He just came back this week so he's going through some rough adjusting. I don't think I could be able to do what he's doing right now.



This was an awesome week! Mike and Nick got baptized on Friday. It was an awesome evening! The members baptized them and then on Sunday, we had the confirmations in sacrament meeting. I confirmed Mike and Brother Pozzi confirmed Nick. After the baptism, Mike came up to us and said he felt a little empty. He felt like there was something missing. Sure enough, after the confirmation on Sunday, Mike learned that baptism by water is not complete without the baptism by fire. We have a lesson scheduled with Isabel for Thursday and we already have her fellowshipper ready to go. Mike also wants us to teach his son who is moving in from Ontario. He has an incredible missionary mind.

Tiffany is progressing well. She is ready for the 4th!

Our other investigators bailed on us during this week. We're having a rough time getting a hold of them. We do have lessons scheduled this week with them as well. This is a cool miracle: We're working with a less active and told him we wanted to go over the missionary lessons with him in a week. We challenged him to bring a nonmember friend to that lesson. He listed off a bunch of friends he could find for us. We established how were going to follow up with each other and went our separate ways. We hadn't heard back from Tyler for about 3 days so we called him and he said he had someone who was inactive but needed the missionary lessons out in Airdrie. We thought that was pretty sweet and encouraged him to continue to find a nonmember to taught on Thursday. This morning, the sister missionaries in Airdrie called and told us they have a referral for us for someone they had been teaching in Airdrie! We had a "switcheroo" I guess.

We helped Bev out with some service on Saturday. She is really stressed with moving right now that she wants to start the lessons again after she moves. She understands that we have a lot of patience even though we would like to teach her right now.



I was thinking about Mike's comment about his empty feeling and it made me think about how crucial it is that we follow the enitre gospel of Jesus Christ: 1. Faith in Jesus Christ and His atonement 2. Repentance 3. Baptism for the remission of sins 4. Gift of the Holy Ghost 5. Endure to the end... After Mike's baptism, he was only experiencing what 3/5 of the gospel can offer us. The gift of the Holy Ghost is an incredible gift from our Heavenly Father. Baptism is pointless without that gift. I am so grateful for this gospel and how simple it is. It is the only way we can return to live with Heavenly Father.



Love,

Elder Madsen