#temple, #baptism date, #ihatehashtags

Dear Family,

Let me tell you a story about two kids that were sent to the hospital. So this week was pretty good, besides the fact that we drove like 300 miles this week...oh I forgot about my story I was telling. We weren't the two kids that went to the hospital, I don't even know two kids sent there. Elder Hansen just told me to start it out that way. :)

TEMPLE TRIP!!! Do you know how far the temple is from us!! Far far away, in a green field far away actually...We had to drive to Wahoo, which is 50 miles from us, then they took us the other 50 miles to the temple. Got spiritually uplifted, then drove 50 miles back to their place, then 50 miles back to our neck of the corn fields. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be driving that much and all you listen to are conference talks,  MoTab and the sound of us beating our heads against the window?! It's Great!!

We got a baptism set!! :D Missionaries have been teaching them for a while and we just weren't quite sure what to do. The dad smokes and doesn't really want to quit and all 3 of his kids wanted him to baptize them, or we thought. We went in with the possibility of dropping them but we were talking to the kids and found out one wants to be baptized and she doesn't mind who does it! :D They have all been taught the lessons and everything and we went through the baptism  questions and she could answer pretty much all of them. She just needs to come to church and we are going to recap all the lessons with her and hopefully we'll have a baptism May 16th!! The only thing that will be hard is they live in Utica, which is like 30 min. away and it's going to bite us in the butts on miles...so hopefully we can get a non Utica member to take us.

"Hey Elders, will you guys both speak this Sunday?  GREAT!"  Actually it wasn't all that bad, it could just be the fact that there were only like 55 people there and it's not like I was standing clear up on the stand and using a little Primary Room microphone. We were asked to talk about a conference talk that stood out to us. So I spoke on Elder Cook's and Elder Pearson's talks. I mostly talked about Cooks talk, then at the end I used Pearson's talk since he talked a lot about Lehi's dream. Where are you on the path? Are you just starting out, are you holding steadfastly to the rod? Are you holding on with one or two fingers? Are you partaking of the fruit then feel embarrassment and leave? Or are you staying by the tree and helping others come?  Now I thought my talk went pretty well, I was the last one to speak and was almost done with my talk when something was going on in one of the rows...a little kid threw up!! LOL!! I was like "ummmm...what do I do?" But I just kept going and Elder Hansen was like "man, it was like you didn't have a clue what happened, you just kept going!" I knew what happened but I was almost done with my talk. So now I can say my talk must have been so bad that someone threw up during it. :)

That's about it for the week, we're going to go play some basketball again this week...so much basketball!!! But I guess it's keeping me running so I'm all game for it. Have a great week and enjoy the Temple picture I took!!!

Love you all!!

Elder Searle