Elder Lacey's Mission Letters: God Hears Our Prayers

October 14, 2013

Dear Mom and Family,

That is awesome that you got to talk to Grant Walker! He is such a great guy. That is to bad that he is already home while we get to be down here doing work! I am pumped that he got accepted to BYU.

I got to see all of the pictures you sent me. You guys are looking good! Its nice to hear that everything is going well for everybody.

Mom, I loved those quotes that you sent me! Those explain a lot about humility and pride. Pride is definitely a huge problem because it is so hard to actually spot in yourself.

But time sure is flying by. It seems like I was just e-mailing you yesterday but a week as already gone by. Elder Ve'e and I have been working really hard to try and build this area up. It has been struggling more then we even thought. But things are looking up. This week E' Ve'e and I found a lot of New Investigators that look promising. Right now we have 4 people who have dates for baptism. One of them is Claudia. She is about 65 and loves to talk about religion....Sometimes a little to much. haha It is pretty difficult to actually get through a lesson and stay on topic. She likes to talk a lot, especially about the "Juventud" and how they are so wicked these days. But she really likes everything that we talk about and we have been able to answer all of her questions. In the last charla we had with her I witnessed a small miracle. Everyday before personal study I always pray that I will be guided to study what I will need to teach for the day. So when we were in the charla with her she had a lot of questions about child baptism and about Adam and Eve and about people’s agency and why there is so much wickedness in the world. It turns out that every single one of her questions I had studied about during my personal study. So we were able to answer all of her questions using the Book of Mormon. It was awesome! It really strengthened my testimony that God listens to our prayers and we can be instruments in his hands if we let him.

Everything has been going well! We are really focusing on working with the menos activos here because there are a ton so hopefully we will be able to bring some back into the fold. We are loving the work though! We are still really pumped to be working together here where there is a lot of work to be done.

Give everybody hugs! And tell Olivia Happy Birthday for me on the 20th!

I love you guys!

Dear Dad,

Its nice to know that the Young Men in your ward have a good Young Mens President to look up to. You said it perfectly. The Gospel is like the oxygen that everybody needs. Everything makes so much sense to me down here. I look back at my life before the mission and I was kind of an idiot haha But now I am learning exactly what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It is kind of funny the excuses that we make. Before the mission I thought that a lot of the excuses we make were perfectly fine. But I am learning a lot about sacrifice. You have to do everything that the Lord commands you everyday. We can't make excuses. We learn in 1 Nephi 3:7 that the Lord will always prepare a way for us to cumplir with the commandments. It doesn't matter what else is in our lives. We can always do what the Lord says. Down here we hear a lot of "I don't have time" I work 12 hour days and I have kids, I don't have time to read the Book of Mormon. Yes it is tough, but there is always 5 minutes of our day that we can sacrifice so that we can be edified by the Good Word.

But I am glad that my football teams are doing good! Keep cheering on the cougs and tell the boys in Farmington that Lace dog is cheering them on.

Love you Dad,

Elder Lacey