Thanksgiving

Matt's baptism 11/28/09 (Curtis Baker, Matt's brother Josh, Matt's Mom, Matt, Matt's sister Megan

I'm actually three weeks behind in posting Elder Goodale's letters - sorry!!! But here is the e-mail we received from him on Monday of this week (11/30). You see here that he mention's Matt's baptism at 6am on Saturday. He had told us the previous week (still to be posted), "He wanted to do it at 6 because he thought it would be cool to go into the church when it's dark outside and when he comes out after being baptized the sun will be coming up."
--> Pretty cool, eh?!-------------------

Elder Moxon, Matt, me

Matt and his Mom

Elder Moxon and Matt

Happy Monday! How's everybody doing? How was your Thanksgiving? We had a great Thanksgiving here. We didn't go out and work on Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving and Christmas are the only days of the year we don't proselyte) but we had a great day nonetheless. For lunch we went out to the Goodman's and had our main Thanksgiving meal down there. They have a 750 acre ranch down by Dadeville (one of the bigger towns we cover - population 224!), about a half hour south of where we live. We had alot of fun there. I'm pretty sure that was the first Thanksgiving I've had where the main meat was venison, which I was happy about. Of course they had plenty of turkey and ham too, so I just had small amounts of all 3 meats. I really didn't eat all that much that day.

Me and Matt

Matt with girlfriend Leslie

Curtis and Matt

Matt and Leslie

Then in the evening we went out to the Pulsiphers, one of my favorite families in the ward, and had some more dessert (don't worry, I only had 4 pieces of pie that day. Or maybe 5. I don't remember) over there and played games for awhile. It was alot of fun. Then on Saturday morning we had a baptism! Matt was baptized at 6am. It was really awesome. In fact, for every baptism I have a part in from now on, I'm going to try to convince them to do it real early like that... It was really neat. And surprisingly, we had a ton of people there, even at that early time! I would say at least 40 or so. We had everything set up, then right before it started we had to put out another row of chairs. Then that filled up! It was great. Even Elder Moxon and I's musical number went very well, for that time. The Spirit was so strong the entire time, it was probably the best baptismal service I've seen so far. The only other time I've felt the Spirit that strongly at a baptism was over 2 years ago, at Bailey's baptism. We had a couple of investigators there too (Emily and Curtis) so that made it even better. Actually a bunch of Matt's family came too, and hopefully we'll be able to start teaching them soon. He has an 18 year old sister named Megan that we've taught a couple of times, but she hasn't really progressed at all, but ever since Matt's baptism she's been talking about getting baptized, too! She has alot she needs to work on, but she can do it. We could set a baptismal date with her this week.

We also had another miracle Sunday at church. Leslie, who grew up as part of that polygamist group but was baptized this last May, has a 13 year old brother named Derek. A few months ago he was getting into alot of trouble, so his mom wanted him to start going to church. He had the option of going to the plig church with his dad or going to our church with his sister. Luckily he decided to go with Leslie. So starting back in August, he started coming to church. He complained about it alot at first, but only for a couple of weeks because pretty soon he started to really enjoy church. In fact, when Elder Moxon and I got here we had no idea that he's not even a member. We just assumed that he had been baptized. Well the more we associated with that family (we're over there alot, plus Derek comes and helps us every Saturday morning when we're out helping the Broadbents build their house) I realized that he probably wasn't. Saturday I asked Leslie about it, and she told me the whole story. Derek and I are pretty close now, so then yesterday at church, I just asked him "So Derek, when are you going to get baptized?" And he told us that he's been thinking about it alot lately! Even though he doesn't live with his dad (his parents are divorced) since his dad practices polygamy Derek will still need First Presidency approval to be baptized, so we're working on setting up that general authority interview now. Hopefully it'll all get set up soon!

That's the most exciting stuff that happened this week. Thank you so much for your continued prayers, I know it's had a part in how incredibly blessed we've been here. Have a great week! Love you!