Classic Elder White!!  I can hardly wait for NEXT week's letter!! 

This week we taught Nathalie 3 or 4 times. She has the date for her baptism set as the 1st of April, but we have to reschedule it again... because that's General Conference weekend, which is frustrating, but it's okay. Her Dad is fine with her being baptized into the church, but her Mom is from Mexico and is as Catholic as the Pope. She was confused because Nathalie was baptized when she was a baby, so why would she need to be baptized again? That is an easy question to answer, but a very difficult question to answer without hurting people's feelings. The Answer is: You have to be baptized by one who holds the Priesthood authority of God, which was lost after the death of Christ’s original Apostles and the restored to the prophet Joseph Smith (and from him down through the church to us today). Then, too, you have to choose to be baptized on your own--babies have no sin and are not accountable for their actions, therefore they cannot consciously choose to be baptized. The third reason, that I could think of, is that baptism without being given the gift of the Holy Ghost isn't complete, like Christ said, we must be,  “. . . born of the water and of the Spirit” (see John 3:5 and Acts 8:14-17).

         I have been here in Albertson (never forget to pronounce it "All-bur-sun") for.. well, since August. Sister Van Winkle in the ward was cutting my hair this morning and asked about how long I've been here. She said, "Wow, that's more than half of a year!" --but it doesn't really feel like it. It just feels like I live here in Albertson. I love Albertson, North Carolina and the people who live here.  I am not sure if I would want to live here permanently, as there is nothing out here but hog houses and turkeys--also we aren't really close to anywhere of note, but despite that, some of the best people I have ever met live out here and they feel like family. So if I do get transferred next week, I will be sad to go and will miss the people here a lot.

         On Friday we did service for one of my favorite families here who have sort of a homestead farm where they raise all manner of animals. While we were there we gathered all the chicken, duck, and geese eggs and sorted them. Then we fed all the animals including all 45 goats, oh, yeah, and the sheep, too. We are going back Wednesday because they need some help gelding some donkeys, which should be--umm, interesting, I suppose, so you can look forward to that in the next email! They have a wide variety of animals, from fainting goats to wood ducks, from Rhode Island Reds to Polish chickens and everything in between. While we were there some of the goats got into the chicken pen (they have a bunch of coops and then a penned in area around the outside of the coops), so we had to try to catch the goats and get them back into their own pen. Goats are a lot faster than you might think. They had a bunch of little baby goats too(!)--that felt like little baby cashmere sweaters when you held them.

         In other news, one of our investigators we have been teaching for 3 months agreed to be baptized, but then moved back to Iowa, so that's a bummer, but it was a great week over all!  Until next week I hope y'all have a blessed day! 

 

--Elder White