Tornado!!!

Dear Family,

     Hey everybody! We had an awesome week. Transfers were Thursday, so Elder Richins went off to Tulsa and now it's just Elder Ewert and I. Back to two again. I still can't believe that I'm getting to stay here 7 months, I never thought I'd have 5 transfers in one area. I'm excited though, because things are going great. I can't believe how blessed we are, with the success that just keeps coming. Right now we have 3 baptismal dates, all set for June 26. They are all children from Part-Member Families (Alyssa, age 12, Anita, age 10, and Devontae, age 10). We also have several others that are very close to baptism, we are going to have several in July. The Taylor family came to church again this week, and it went really well. They came a couple of months ago, and didn't like it, but we've been working with them and we got them to come again this week and it went well. At least the kids really loved it. They are planning on coming next week as well. That's the mom, Nicole, then 15 year old son Phillip, 12 year old daughter Kimmy, and 7 year old son Hunter. Their dad is deployed right now, but he is supposed to get home the first week of July. We're going to be focusing a lot more on them the next few weeks, hopefully we can get them really involved in the ward and really into the church by the time their dad gets home, then we can baptize the whole family. They've really started to make a lot of progress lately. The last two weeks we've found a lot of new investigators that really have a lot of promise. I'm very excited about the next couple of months. The area has already been on fire (those 3 baptisms will make 16 since I've been here), but it's right on the brink of exploding even more. As I said, we've been really, really blessed. I just wish the time would stop going so quickly! We also had a fun experience on Elder Richins last night here on Wednesday... We finally had a tornado! This spring we've gotten so much less action then last year, I though nature was going to forget us this year. But we had a really great storm that night! We were actually over at the Taylor's house teaching them, which is good because they have a basement that we all went to when the sirens started going off. The tornado just touched down out in the woods on Fort Leonard Wood, so no significant damage from that, but we also got about golf ball size hail, a lot of wind, and well over 2,000 lightning strikes over the course of about an hour, including one awesome moment when we saw 6 different strikes at one time, all around us. It was as bright as mid-day. It was a really impressive storm, and as always very fun to watch. I love the weather out here! I think we're supposed to get some more storms tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for us. :)

Love,
Elder Goodale