Happy Easter

Happy Easter!

btw, the mailman just came into the office while we were sitting in staff meeting this morning and brought in your letter. I'll take care of it today.

Cool story: I was on exchanges with the Findlay zone leaders in their area this week and we taught a super solid guy - he's known a couple of LDS families throughout his life and always been very impressed by the ways they lived up to their high standards and stuck together as families. He's had questions, but never been invited to learn more (until this week he was invited to meet with us by his friend who got home from his mission a couple weeks ago). It was an amazing lesson - the Spirit was super strong and he wanted to learn. A couple quotations from that lesson:
"So, I'm not sure if you have to be born a member of the church, or can I join?"
"I'll be in this area until August - is that long enough to become a member"
(after teaching the apostasy): Yeah, I've definitely seen that in a lot of my churches I've gone to - everybody's got a different interpretation!
(after sharing Joseph Smith's experience): Whoa - Hold on - I don't want be rude and interrupt or anything, but I just have to say that that makes SO much sense! Where did the prophets go?

We invited him to be baptized on May 28th, and he accepted readily. He went to Kirtland the next day and had a great experience. The night after, he stayed up all night reading the Book of Mormon and praying to know the truth. He now knows. He is excited for baptism and would like to serve a mission as well.

Arches sounds exciting! what was the weather and temperature like? Way to go doing the 9 mile hike! that's impressive - how long did it take?

We had plenty of nonmembers at church yesterday, but no investigators (the Schroths were out of town). We're working on trying to get some of those nonmembers to become investigators, though. Easter is a great day for getting people to church. Sunday was probably the shortest and unorthodox sacrament meeting I've ever attended, though. It only lasted about 40 minutes and some of the pretty standard components of a sacrament meeting were missing - like the closing hymn, etc. (Due to a series of unfortunate and confusing events.)

Loveymnb,
Elder Matthew Smith


I emailed and said: We're all wondering what events happened to make sacrament meeting so interesting!

Matt replied:

no "amen" in the sacrament prayer

no closing hymn

no "in the name of Jesus Christ" in closing prayer

the bishopric left the stand when the choir got up to sing. The cantata was much shorter than expected. There was one speaker afterwards, and it didn't take too much time. After he got down, everyone kind of just looked around at eachother. The bishop had left the chapel to take care of one of his kids. So, the 1st counselor just pointed at the person assigned to give the closing prayer, and up he went. After that we all pretty much sat there in the chapel, because the other ward wasn't out of their sunday school classes yet