What Wonderful Week

Hello everyone! Dearest family and friends, I love you all! This week has been a crazy one, and a beautiful one.

I have found I do things best by telling stories through pictures, so here goes.

1) This one is the most important thing that happened this week! M got baptized! It was so exciting, and was just a wonderful experience.  B baptized him, he is a member here in the ward, and they have formed a great friendship. It's wonderful to see the members get involved in the work here. I confirmed him on Sunday, but I don't have any pictures of that, so yeah. :)

2) The lake is beautiful this time of year. We found out that our area actually extends about a half mile into the lake, so we are hoping to get permission to go out and see if there are any mer-people who want to be taught.... Until then, we just tract next to the lake to get pretty views while we work. :)

3) This picture may seem trivial, but it got me thinking. This police officer was waiting here to catch any one who decided to speed through or run a light. He was literally sitting on the island of a light post, just waiting. You would think this was way too obvious, and everybody would see him. But would he be parked there if it wasn't worth his time? Sometimes the adversary is like this with us. He will just park himself in an obvious place, and wait for us to do something wrong, and trap us there. Sometimes we see him, and still make the mistake. Other times we gets caught and wonder how we never saw him
hiding in plain sight. The best advice I think anyone could ever get, is to 'obey the law' whether you see the trap or not. If you are always doing what is right, you never have to worry about being caught
doing something wrong.

4) The last one also has a thought behind it. We were tracting and a woman was cleaning her garage. We stopped to talk and offered to help. She had just finished, so she declined the offer, but she wanted to talk, so we stood around in her driveway and chatted for a while. We saw this car in the garage, and (obviously) started drooling over it.  She got us some water, and we asked if we could take pictures. She
said of course, and told us that this was her husbands car and he LOVED it. We continued talking, and a few minutes later her husband pulled up. We started talking with him too, and mentioned the car.
(Come on, someone has a Ferrari California and you don't ask them about it? As if.) he told us he did, in fact love his car, but finished the statement with something extremely profound. "Sure it's nice, but it's just a car, isn't it? It's not like it matters in the end." How often do we, as humans, as members of the church, as Americans, forget this? They are just objects. It's not like they matter in the end. One of my favorite plays is simply titled 'You Can't Take It With You.' Sure, things are nice, and money is good. But
you can't take it with you, so does it matter at the end of the day?

The week was great, but oh! Transfer calls! I guess I should tell you about that. I'm........staying! So is Elder T, so we will be together at our six month mark, so that will be exciting. I'm taking a lot more pictures, so I think that is what most of my emails will consist of from here on out. I do miss my beautiful camera at home, but I guess what I have will have to do.

Well, other than that, the week was business as usual. I love you all!
Have a great week!

-Elder Logan Gifford