Dearest Family!                                                 12/4/16

 

Thanksgiving was great! We took a couple minutes to set up some Christmas!

Thank you for singing me happy birthday! I think I heard it all the way over here in Arizona! My birthday was AWESOME! It was honestly the best Birthday, because it was on a Sunday, and one of the most solid investigators that I have ever taught was confirmed in that day. This is a picture of him:

This is R! He is so great! If you want to see someone who has repented and changed his life COMPLETELY, you need to come meet R, and I hope someday that you will get to meet him. He is an inspiration to me. At his baptism, the spirit was extremely powerful. Everyone felt it. After he got changed, he came up to bear his testimony. And he said: "I am stoked! I feel even better than I thought that I would feel! This is awesome!" He is so happy. Oh, what a beautiful thing, and what an absolute privilege it was to be able to teach him. It wasn't easy... there were a lot of really rough times, but God made it happen. And it is all worth it! Last Sunday, after he was confirmed, I was watching him and priesthood meeting, and he was SOOOOO GIDDY and HAPPY and LAUGHING and SMILING! I have never, ever seen him happier! He looked like CALEB WHEN HE GETS PRESENTS! He seriously looked like a gleeful little boy. He was beaming. And it all started when he saw the light and joy of members of the church that he worked with. They had something that he didn't, and he wanted it SO bad. President Robinson asked him for his conversion story. Here is his conversion story: 

"Sorry for the delay in getting this out, but speaking relatively, it took me 24 years to find Christ, the fact that it took me about a week to write this e-mail isn’t too bad I guess J

I had a relatively normal childhood. I was born to a Catholic mother and an Atheist father. My dad tells people he’s a Druid if they ask, he hates religion that much. My mother can’t have children so my siblings are all adopted, but somehow she had me. I’ve always found that weird.

I grew up “Catholic” until about the 4th grade when women stopped being allowed on the alter. My mom didn’t like that too much, and we stopped going to church. I put Catholic in quotations because I never believed in God. In my mind, God was one of the great scams of the world. Throughout high school and college I was one of the more popular kids. One could say I had a fascination with drugs, alcohol, and women. I overdosed on pills in high school, was arrested in college and I don’t remember anything about either because I was so intoxicated, but nothing changed me. I didn’t want to change. I thought that those vices companied with money was what would make me a happy, successful man. And I was happy, for those moments. But there were certain times, particularly in quiet moments alone, when I kept thinking that there had to be something else. There had to be something bigger.

I started my dream career at Deloitte about a year ago, and in doing so, met a few people who called themselves Mormons. I had no idea what that meant, I just thought they were all weird because we lived completely opposite lives. What I couldn’t understand is why they were happy. They didn’t participate in any of the activities that I considered necessary for a good life; yet, they were truly happy. I consistently picked on them, learning about the faith only to try and poke holes in it. However, the more I tried to find things wrong with their religion and way of life, the more I learned about it and how strongly they felt about God and His impact on their lives.

About seven months ago, a good Mormon friend of mine left Deloitte. To this day I can’t tell you exactly why, but I eventually asked if I could go to church with him & his family. He immediately said yes. About the third time I went to church with him, I left in the middle of Sunday School. I wasn’t getting anything out of it, and I thought this would be the last time I would ever try to find religion.

Driving home, I had a sudden urge to turn back. I now know that was the Spirit. And I did.

I began to visit the missionaries weekly and ended up consistently going to church. It was still very weird to me. Praying felt like I was talking to a voice in my head. Reading the Book of Mormon seemed like reading a Harry Potter book, good stories but they meant nothing. Church was a time when I sat there, stared into the sky, and told God, “I’m here… do something.” It was a few months after doing all that I was supposed to when I finally felt God’s blessings, particularly peace.

I was at home with 50 or so family members, all reminiscing on my grandmother who had passed away a few years back. She was the strongest person I’d ever met, but she had a terrible fight with Alzheimer’s, and she lost. As my parents worked very hard when I was younger, my siblings and I were essentially raised solely by my grandmother. For an entire year, I had to visit the person who had raised me since a baby, and I had to deal with her wondering who I was and why I was in her home. When this was happening, I thought if there was a God, he was a bully toying with my emotions. But this time specifically, something was different. Instead of being angry or sad, I remembered what the missionaries had told me. I remembered the plan of salvation, and despite my grandmother not being a religious woman, I knew that God knew her, knew she was a great person, and I knew she would accept the gospel. I finally felt peace about death, and through that, I trusted in God enough to feel peace about life.

After that day, the Book of Mormon started to make sense. I understood what Alma meant when he talked about the seed of faith. At that time, my seed had grown. And I am so eternally grateful for that.

Elder Holland has a talk in which he says, “In this Church, what we know will always trump what we do not know. And remember, in this world, everyone is to walk by faith”. I hold that quote close to me, because as I’ve only been around God’s word for a little bit, I do not know everything, nor do I claim to. But I do know, that the Book of Mormon speaks to me in a way that I’ve never experienced before, because I’d never opened my heart to God before.

I now pray often, and I know that I’m speaking to my Heavenly Father. I read the Book of Mormon, and I know that I’m reading God’s word. I go to Church and I know that being in that place brings me some of the greatest happiness I’ve known.

Ultimately, how I came to the Church is still odd to me. Many of the people I’ve told about my change don’t believe me, and if you told me a year ago this would happen, I’d have called you crazy. It’s a mixture of God’s love, the missionaries hard work, and a friend that unselfishly told a kid, who’d made fun of his religion, that it was more than okay for him to worship alongside him. I appreciate you asking me to write this stuff down, I hope to look back on this someday and laugh at how young my faith was J

Thanks,

R" 

I love you all a lot! And am so happy that I can serve my Heavenly Father. Have a wonderful week!

Elder Flake