Hi Family!
How are you all doing? Busy I am guessing? That's good! We're super busy out here in the cornfield land of wonderfulness... the corn is about hip height which is exciting! I love watching it grow (I'm embracing my inner nerd :)) "look at the baby corn!" is one of my favorite things to say to my companions.
So Karen got baptized on Saturday! It was such a good day! It was pretty insane getting to that point! We really wanted to find a cello so Sister Youngberg could come back and play it for the baptism (because she's very talented and she loves Karen) So we hunted up and down far and wide and then to our utter surprise the Gray's in our ward (Karen's #1 fellowshiper) decided their daughter was going to start playing the cello so they'd get on board with that and rent her cello earlier than they were planning, so Sister Youngberg got to play a very pretty cello at Karen's baptism! Karen was baptized by Dr. Gray (Nat and Sar I thought you'd appreciate that ;) ) and we had a lot of musical numbers and Karen wanted the whole Gray family to bear their testimony and it was really a neat baptism. Oh! I forgot the fun part! So we had a horrible storm on Friday night, one with the fantastic strobe light lightning and epic thunder and oddles of rain... the whole shabang, this also caused the power to go out in our church building. So as our ward mission leader was filling up the font saturday morning he discoverd no light or AC which equals misery in Nebraska.... So we moved the baptism to Plattsmouth! (pronounced plattsmith) it was great! I was thinking the whole morning about how minimal the opposition has seemed to be preparing for her baptism when bam... we had to reschedule the whole event. But all went well! What an amazing day. I feel so blessed to be serving in the Fairview ward right now.
So I have a question I have been pondering that perhaps you can study about in your own studies, "How does understanding the restoration allow families to access the atonement?" Cool question right? I have to do a training in district meeting this week on that question so I'll be pondering it more, but it has been interesting to think about. The restoration teaches us how to use the atonement, you must begin by knowing that god is our loving heavenly father that all things that happen are to help us come closer to him. Second you must recognize those he has put in our lives to strengthen us, this includes our family, friends, leaders and council from the Prophet. We learn god's will through all of these resources. Third once we understand where we fit in the picture we must understand that sometimes we may feel we are in a great apostasy, sometimes we may feel in the dark sometimes we feel we need a restoration. Next comes the Prophet Joseph Smith, he had the faith to pray, the faith to seek a way out of apostasy. We too must have the faith to pray to let our Father in Heaven help us! We must find our own personal pillar of light. Once we do these things we must continue to act through studying the book of Mormon, this is how we continue to learn about Christ's life and continue to understand the atonement. So there is the Restoration in a nutshell, and how it connects to the atonement. So family do you understand the restoration? Are you letting it help you understand the atonement? I hope so. I'm grateful for the strength each one of you are in my life. Keep your faith strong, I know that that is one of the most important things you can ever do. I pray you all have a save and enjoyable week!
Love you soooo much!
Sister McMaster
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