1st Baptism

Dear Family,

So we did a good amount of service this week, we helped a less active with his fence. He has some issues and has cancer, which is sad. He has a 6 year old little girl who is really funny. We fixed it up and also had to make sure his little tiny dogs wouldn't get out. We pretty much put up a whole new gate so that his car could get in and out. It took about 4 hours to do this, when the Kanesville elders came to pick us up, we all went for ice cream we were so hot!

We also got a call from a member in our ward who is super nice, they are also in the Temple Presidency. They said they were having a good friend come over for dinner and they wanted us to come eat with them so they could introduce us to him. We thought that was super funny that they wanted us to come because they have the sisters living with them. The food was soooooo good! The best  food I've had on my mission, hands down. It was all homemade and just awesome!! They also told us some funny stories about the sister missionaries so we will have to tease them about that. The dude that came over, he knows the church is true but doesn't want to change.

Since Keowa was going to be baptized, we tried to see him as often as we could. We had lots of check-ins with him because the week people are going to be baptized, Satan does everything He can to change their minds about being baptized.

One of the days Keowa came over, we were doing our weekly planning. Since it was a super nice day, we decided to go outside on these sweet lawn chairs we found in the garage. They have leg rests so that's why they were super cool! We were outside for 4-5 hours and my face got super sunburned. That night I found out I fried the inside of my legs because I was in shorts, that made it hard to walk a bit! Oh well, my fault.

So Saturday was baptism day! The Kanesville ward put together a service activity for everyone. We helped them redo this community garden place. I guess you can pay to have a spot of dirt to plant stuff, kinda strange. anyway...we all got in our yellow "Helping Hands" shirts (which I didn't take a picture of, fat people don't look good in yellow shirts!) :P So we did that all morning.

We then went home to get everything ready for the baptism, which went well. Keowa invited 2 of his friends to come, one even took a Book of Mormon so that was cool, and his mom came too. A lot of ward members came too, there were a lot of little kids running around, so it was kinda loud, but it was all good. My face was still super red from getting sunburned, I guess it hid my face for how nervous I was, but it went really well. I baptized him and Elder Daines confirmed him.

After the baptism, we decided to throw a little party and invited Keowa and Maranda to the Olive Garden, it was expensive because we paid for them. We bought for them because they have done so much for us. We ate and had a good time, we then went to Lake Manawa, we all went in Keowa's '79 teal Impala. We went and skipped rocks and had a good time. There was a TON of lightening going on, it was sweet!! The baptism started at 2pm and we got home at 9pm, so we pretty much spent the whole afternoon/night with them.

Love you guys!!

Love Elder Searle