Baptism and Investigator

The baptism here went well. The tie is very nice also. I don't know how you find such good ties, but the ones you have sent me are great ties.

I'll send you the envelope with the different pictures in it, I'll try to put something a little bit stiff in the bubble wrapped envelope so that the memory card doesn't bend and get damaged (remember that case that holds the memory card? it's still with you.) You'll probably enjoy the videos, you will just have to turn up the sound a lot. Also, for the Christmas skit that I was a part of, the Elder recording couldn't figure out how to record, so he missed the first couple minutes, the last video comes to a halt, because that is where my camera battery died.

I received three letters from Joshua, one forwarded from you mother, another that I will forward you from him today with the memory card. I received them all on the same day too, that was kind of cool. If you dear-elder-ed it the same day that Joshua had his preparation day (Monday?) then they traveled together and got here both at the same time.

We had a crazy lesson this past week with someone that has come to church 3 times now. He received a gospel principles book the first week he was at church and we've been continually asking him to read and pray. So he did read; he read the gospel principles last then first couple chapters. (Last chapter: exaltation, first couple all hint at exaltation). So I called him Thursday morning to confirm for our Friday appointment and he told me what he had read, that it presented "ideas that I had never even considered before" and requested that our topic of our lesson be on "The Nature of God". We brought a great member with us (Bishop Ross's father) and the lesson went great. It started with him saying "I hit a brick wall when I read that" and "It sounds utter blasphemous, but I'm sure you'll tell me otherwise" to ending the lesson with "Ok, I'll give it a shot to find out if this is true". It was an awesome lesson, completely had nothing to do with what we ought to be focusing lessons on, but it sure was still lots of fun, I hope we don't ever have a request of a lesson like that again though. That kind of doctrine too soon can easily go the wrong direction before they have a solid testimony of some of the more basic principals. We were talking about it later though, and we decided that he's going to figure the doctrine of exaltation out sooner or later, so it might as well be from the right source, the gospel principal book. Then, yesterday, we had stake conference broadcasted to our building and he was at church and the first speaker was President Baughman, the South Carolina Columbia Temple President, the second speaker was the stake patriarch, and all of the talks after it had a connotation to exaltation too. It was an awesome stake conference and I'm really glad he came. The different topics for the many speakers tended to be exaltation, temples, or patriartical blessings. Unfortunately many other people we have been working with that really needed to hear some of the things that were spoken about didn't. Specifically people that we just had temple lessons with and were working toward the temple and other people that we had recommending to go and get their patriartical blessings.

Mother, what a great privilege you have to serve as a seminary teacher. It helps to focus personal study when you have an objective behind studying.

P.S. Monica, I'm unbiased too, you're gorgeous. As a caution: Don't let others take advantage of you. =-)

Love you all,

Elder Walker (ooo now you are going to be confused because I didn't tell you which 'Elder Walker' I am)