Great week to have a birthday.

Hello (:

This week was great! Thanks again for the package! It has brought much happiness (:

Ben came to church yesterday!! He is doing so well! He let us know this past week that nothing is going to stop him from being baptized. It is so cool seeing somebody who didn't really have a belief in God not to long ago have such a strong testimony of him. His prayers are so sincere that it makes me want to pray better! We taught him the Word of Wisdom, the Law of Chastity, pray often, study the scriptures, and keep the Sabbath Day Holy this week. It was a productive week for his progress! He has the missionary fire too. A member in our stake is housing two Chinese students for about a month and he wants to share the Gospel with them so bad. So we will see how that goes! 

We taught our investigator Erick. He wasn't able to make it to church today but we taught him about the Word of Wisdom and why it is important. We set him with a baptismal date of August 9th. He is doing really good. He has some word of wisdom issues, but nothing that can not be overcome. 

We came up with a creative way to teach our investigator Luke. He has a short attention span, so we had to keep him really interactive with the lesson. We taught him the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we reviewed the lesson afterwards and he seemed to retain the majority of it. We also watched a couple videos that would keep his attention, so it went well.

Our investigator Nolan is doing good. We had a few lessons with him this week and taught him about keeping the Sabbath Day holy and reading the Book of Mormon and praying everyday. We are mainly just trying to get him some friends that will consistently invite him out to activities.

My birthday was really good! We just continued to work hard, and we got a lot done! The other Elders that we are living with made breakfast and it was really good (: So it was a good birthday! And I forgot to mention what I did on the 4th of July in my last letter... haha it was spent doing a lot of paperwork... unfortunately! But we got to get out and talk to a few people so it was great!

This week I studied about receiving the spirit/light of Christ, and how we can receive that spirit/light through our righteous works, meet for repentance. I guess it all comes down to "by their fruits ye shall know them." If their works are good, that will definitely show, and not necessarily just their works, but their attitude toward their work. I figured that I could be exactly obedient, but if I didn't have a positive attitude about it, it wouldn't mean much at all. So I've been trying to have a better attitude about everything! It really helps.

Well! Sorry this is a bit shorter. But I hope you have a great week! Thanks for all the pictures of the fam (: Everybody looks so much different! Love and miss ya lots! Talk to ya soon (:

Love,

Elder Teeples!