Working hard & seeing prayers answered

Hello everyone!

This week, President Weston called us letting us know that he wants us to split up the area between the 2 sets of elders. We met and cut the area down one of the major roads, and now we have a much smaller area! Our original area was made up of about 4 subsections, and we got 1 area while the other elders got the other 3. The area we got is really busy with work though, and there are a lot of apartment complexes there too.

We are teaching a guy named Chris, and he is super solid. He got out of prison a couple months ago, and he was in there for about 8 years. He is engaged to a member of the Church who is somewhat less-active. They have been living together for a little bit, so we taught them the Law of Chastity last night, and Chris committed to live it! They said they are planning on getting married ASAP, and they are hoping they can get married this week! Our ward mission leader told us that as ministers of the Gospel, we are technically authorized to perform a marriage. It would be super sweet to be able to say I performed a marriage while on my mission! The Bishop will probably end up performing it though, so it will be super cool. We had taught him on Saturday as well, and he told us that he wanted to be baptized. It kind of caught us off guard, because we weren't even talking about baptism right then. Since he just recently got out of prison he will probably have to wait until he is off parole, but he has a really strong desire to be baptized! It is going to be super cool, because I might be able to go to the Temple when they get sealed together. Going to the temple to see a family that I taught get sealed together is one of my goals on my mission, and hopefully this is it!

I went on exchanges on Tuesday with Elder Larsen. We made sure to do a good job at planning, and making sure we were specific in our prayers. We have had a tough time setting up lessons recently, but since we were praying more specifically in order to set up lessons we were able to set 3 up! It was a really neat experience showing me how much Heavenly Father recognizes even our little efforts. It kind of relates to what someone had said to our district a couple of weeks ago. They said, "It is the Lord's work, so let Him do some of it." It definitely helps to include our Father in Heaven as we are trying to serve Him and His children.

Love you guys so much!

Elder Nielsen

Playing basketball with the neighbors (Ethan on the hoop)

A photo taken by a ward member. He loves the ward he is serving in (so does his mom!).