April 18, 2011

Hey Family!
Well it was quite an exciting week this week as far as the weather, work and everything else goes. I'm sure you are all wondering if I am being serious with the title of this e-mail or not so I will explain it. The weather has been crazy this week. It all started on Monday when Elder Lindemann and I were at a teaching appointment and all of a sudden we started to hear the sirens go off to warn the people that there is a tornado warning. Well we hear these all the time and didnt' think anything of it. We finished our appointment and start to ride to our next one when a police drives up and tells us that we neet to get somewhere safe. So we start to ride home and we noticed that the clouds were super dark and a greenish color. Well we were at a stop light and the wind got super strong the sirens were blowing and it was starting to rain. Needles to say I thought I was going to experience my first tornado on a bike! We ended up making it home safe and all that happened was we got a lot of rain. The areas more north of us had more serious storms but we were find. Then on Friday we had another storm come through. The same one that went through Arkansas and killed I think 8 people. Well Elder Lindemann and I were just planning in our apartment and we have no way of knowing how the weather is. We got a call from the other missionaries and they told us that there was a tornado on the ground and it was headed straight for us! YIKES! So we went downs stairs and got by the bathroom and waited. Then the lights went out and it got really really windy. but nothing ever happend. Come to find out the Tornado pasted 2 tenths of a mile away from us and caused quite a bit of damage to some houses and cars due to falling trees. We were out of power for about 2 hours and others were out of power for 2 days! It was super crazy. So we got to do some service helping people clean up falled trees and things like that. It was really enjoyable.
We had a good experince with our New member that is just a power house of a member. This last saturday he came with us to teach one of his friends who is saying he is interested. So we taught a really good lesson and then we dropped our member off at his house and went home to plan for the next day and do our normal stuff. Well he wasn't at church the next day and we weren't sure why. Turns out after we dropped him off he ended up having one beer and one cigarette. He didn't feel worthy or good enought to come to church. Well we went over to see him and ended up talking about the atonement adn why we have it. We talked about Why Jesus Christ had to suffer for us. It was really good for him to hear but for me aswell. I am so thankful that we have the atonement to help us feel better when we do wrong things. I was glad that he was able to see that and know that he can do better.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is AMAZING!!!! don't ever forget it.