"Any trace of light can defeat total darkness" (August 4)

Wow, wow, wow! Miracles happening every week! I love it!

As you know, Charlie was baptized last Saturday. What I think I failed to mention was that he received the gift of the Holy Ghost on Sunday as well as the Aaronic Priesthood. I haven't been to emotional though out my mission and I expected to be at the baptism but I wasn't. When he went up to be confirmed.. lets just say I wish I hadn't taken my bag of Kleenex out of my purse.. It was bad haha I managed to get control of my allergies before the speakers started their shpill. After sacrament, we went to a side room with his wife's whole family (all 13 siblings plus their kids) to watch him receive the priesthood. I can truly say that I have not felt the spirit as strong of mas much as I did in that room. I held it together until the family left and it was just my companion and Bishop left with me in the room. We sat speechless for quite a while. Bishop then reiterated what I shared last week in my e-mail about Charlie and the effect my stutter had on him. The Lord has BIG plans for Charlie.

The best part of the story (so far) happened this past week. He passed the Sacrament! Sister Metcalf and I had to hold in our excitement because a random guy we've been trying to talk into going to the singles ward showed up! We don't know why Ryder showed up randomly but he did so we had to contain our excitement for Charlie a bit.. We were talking to Bishop after church and we were trying to guess who the next Bishop would be since he's been in for almost six years.. I don't think he will be released anytime soon. As we were tossing around names, Charlie's came up. He paused and reached into his drawer for the program of the sacrament service that day and he shared some of his notes he took (he writes different thoughts that come to mind during the sacrament service). This particular note almost created a repeat of last week. It said "Charlie Wilson. What a Priesthood Power he will be." Or something to that effect. Who know's what's going to happen but as I said before, The Lord has big plans for Charlie.

Anyways, that's what we hope every day-slash-week would be like but usually.. it's not. For example, going back to an old area and just getting doors nicely shut in our faces.. who am I kidding. They were mostly slammed haha oh the joys of Missionary life! Lemme esplain. We were invite to the Boise East District Meeting this past week to help them with a District Exchange since there is only one set of sister in that District and it's sort of hard to do an exchange with only one set. It was probably one of my favorite DMs I've been to in a long time. We focused on how to bring the spirit in to the work even more. Fantastic! After the training and everything, I went with Sister Houseman to my old area. It's reeeeaaaallly hard going back and letting the other person lead but it was good. I got the opportunity to see Alyssa again:) She's doing good and excited for school. She made it on the Cheer team for the High School but they do a lot of things on Sundays so she's thinking of getting off the team. She's solid!

Anyways back to the slamming of doors. At the meeting we were trained on something called "Spirit Finding". Surprisingly, nothing happens in missionary work until you find someone to teach. Weird, right? Well Spirit Finding is really interesting in the way of you have a map of you area and you pray to find people ready to be taught. You don't just look at the map and know right off. Here's how it went. We looked at a map of the Columbia Village ward and divided it in half, East and West, and then we prayed separately to know which side. We both looked up  and said "East" at the same time. Super cool! Then divided it North and South. Prayed and we went North. We did that several times until we got down to one street. Walking that street, we found 4 slammed doors but also a Less Active that the Bishopric stopped by the night before and didn't tell the Sisters they were supposed to go over but we showed up anyways. Really cool!At dinner, we ate with the Miranda's and Brother Miranda said that's how to find "Da One" but you have to pray REALLY hard. It was just funny how he explained it. We did that again after dinner and went clear to the other side of the Ward. We met people who were Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, Atheist and someone who really want into what God had prepared for him.. Oh well. He's missing out. We were about to leave the area and we ran into a kid (about 5 years old) and he started to tell us about baseball.. and then fishing.. and then swimming.. and then the gopher in his front yard. We were waiting for this kid to take a breath but we just looked to his dad who was standing by his car and he said, "He won't stop talking." I thought he was kidding so I tried to ask this kid questions about baseball and he said, "Don't interrupt!" and kept going. Feisty! We started to talk to his dad and the kid started to walk around the yard but was STILL going on and on. Turns out the dad is a LA who just isn't interested in the church right now. But we got a hook in by talking about families and God's purpose for them. He said the sister's could come back sometime to talk. Love it! But yeah.. it felt like dejavu the whole time...

Well I gotta run! We're putting to good use the 500 water balloons from the family:) ... and maybe 800+ more haha Wish us luck!

-Sister Hatch

(i love my job)