Rain, Rain, Go Away

Live the gospel faithfully and with compassion

 Hello everyone! So this week was good, not a whole lot to report though.

So, as you may or may not have already been aware, it's been raining a lot here. Fortunately we weren't hit with Hurricane Harvey, but as it passed by it sent a lot of storms our way. We've been doing our best to avoid being out in the heavy rain, so it hasn't been too bad. Apparently there are some streets and areas that are flooded. We have a little weather radio in our apartment, and at 2:00 this morning it woke all of us up to tell us there was a flood warning. I haven't seen much flooding myself, just some really deep puddles haha. Weirdly there hasn't been much lightning with all the storms, which is kinda a bummer.

Speaking of rain, Saturday morning we helped a family move out of their house in the driving rain. It was a ward service project so the bishop, high priest group leader, young men's leader, and one of the young men were there to help too. It was pretty fun, I was pretty much the designated umbrella holder as we moved stuff in and out of the truck haha.

Yesterday I gave a talk in sacrament meeting, my first one on my mission! I went pretty much a whole year without being asked, that's gotta be a record. It was just a 7 minute talk about the Holy Ghost. I based most of the talk around an analogy with bees (thanks mom). Much like how bees are able to see UV light, and thus distinguish many different pigments in flowers, when we receive the gift of the Holy Ghost it allows us to see in another "spiritual" light. 

Moving service

Taking the analogy further, UV light can reveal hidden messages (think secret ink), cleanse and purify (think camping water bottle filters), and strengthen and solidify (think cementing on braces). In the same way the Holy Ghost is a Revealer, and Purifier, and a Strengthener. And just like any form of light, even though you cannot see it directly you know it is there by observing the things it touches. I could take the analogy further, but I'll let you think about it for yourselves haha.

We've found a lot of success this week working with Jamesly's nonmember family. He's a Haitian young man that has his papers in to serve a mission and he's the only member in his family. Right now we're working to have his little brother Darwins baptized this Saturday. There's a couple more logistics we need to work out, but if we can swing it for this week that'd be awesome. Our next step is to work on the mom, Lucy. She seems pretty open to the message, it's just hard to meet with her or get her to come to church because she works all the time. One thing our mission president encouraged us to do with her is set up a fast with her so that she can get work off to come to church. We're going to meet with them all tonight, so hopefully we can get this worked out.

That's pretty much all I've got to talk about for this week. It'll be a bit longer until my next email, next Friday is when I get to go to the temple! I'm going to print off some family names that I found to take with me. That should be super cool! It'll be interesting to see how it works out, since I'm a 2 hour drive from the temple. We need to have a member take us, and we also have to do all our other p-day things like shop and email still, but we'll see I guess haha. 

Hope all is going well with you! Keep up the good work!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

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A poorly taken photo of the eclipse

The District

​Elder Rock resting peacefully