Week 32
Whenever there is a baptism, that is absolutely the week's highlight.  Daniel was baptized yesterday, and will be confirmed today.  He is a wonderful young man who was raised in the Catholic church, but has explored many other faiths.  In March he wandered by the booth the sisters set up on campus every week, and invited the missionaries to tell him more.  His family is very opposed to his decision to join the church, but he feels absolutely right about it.  We sat in on his final lesson with the sisters on Friday, and we're so excited to have him join the ward.  Last week we decided that we'll give a quadruple combination scripture set to every new convert.  When we give Daniel his, his face lit up like a Christmas tree!  He really loves studying the scriptures and was genuinely pleased to have his own quad.

The sisters, Daniel, and Anthony

On Tuesday there was a Seminaries and Institutes training broadcast--absolutely wonderful, of course.  In addition to the S & I director and a panel discussion, other speakers were Sister Neill Marriott, of the Young Women, and Elder Kim Clark.  The focus of the training was the new Doctrinal Mastery plan for seminaries.  We have remarkable youth, and this will give them remarkable tools to navigate life challenges.  One speaker mentioned a BYU-I devotional talk given by Sherri Dew called Will You Engage in the Wrestle? We watched it this morning, and highly recommend it.  http://www.byui.edu/devotionals/sheri-dew 

Yesterday morning was another S & I in-service at our building for all the teachers in our area.  Brother Valletta led a great discussion about Elevate Learning and obtaining (not just receiving) the word in order to teach with power.  The word of God, the Spirit, and our desire to love and teach the students are required to be effective (D & C 11: 21).  We made cinnamon rolls and a big fruit bowl for the refreshments.  

We got a little busier this week with our classes.  We have previously taught two of the Church History classes, alternating with Brother Valletta, but this week we took over the class for the rest of the summer.  The topic this week was Postwar Recovery, and we had some incredible stories from Europe and the Pacific to share.  The book On Wings of Faith by Babbel was a great source of information about Ezra Taft Benson's 11-month mission to assess the needs, re-open missions, and get welfare services relief the the people all over Europe.  Also this week we started teaching the Missionary Preparation class while the stake teachers assigned to it take off six weeks to have a baby.  Baby girl is supposed to come this week.

The weather was very hot and humid this week.  Over 100 degrees a couple of days, with heat advisories (meaning that the combined effect of the temperature and humidity felt like 110 degrees or more).  We had an errand to run on Thursday, so decided to walk to a building on campus that is not awfully far away.  We were totally wilted by the time we got back, and that was with a stop at the Union to get a lemonade and cool off!  The elders and sisters trade off having the car or biking every couple of days.  Shortly after we got back to the institute on Thursday the poor sisters arrived--their day on bikes and I thought we were going to have a couple of cases of heat exhaustion on our hands! 

 Last night we wandered around the pond in our apartment complex and saw this incredible sunset.  I think Heavenly Father simply goes out of His way to make beauty for His children!

The sunset reflected in our pond