Miracles still can happen

Hey,
How is everyone doing? Everything is going good here. It is pretty hot and humid here, but I am used to it now. And with the zip code, it was the wrong one on the envelope but it still got to me on Wednesday. I guess someone at the post office was being nice and knew where to send it.

Sounds like everyone is having fun at home. The work is going well. We baptized another lady named Mary Williams on Saturday (weird coincidence huh?) It seemed like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We finally started the services about an hour late and everything went well after that. Oh, and to answer your question mom, we only ended up baptizing one 9 year old while I was in Austin.

That is awesome that I get all that money back in taxes. Tell Brooke thanks! I guess you can just put it in my savings. That's awesome about the Longhorns making it to the college world series. Their football stadium, football practice field, and baseball stadium were all just about 100-200 yards outside of my area in Austin. I am not sure if Kerrville is in our mission or not. The map of my mission area is in my call packet. With exchanges, we go on exchanges with each companionship in the district once a transfer. Since I've been companions with district leaders my whole mission, we also go on exchanges with the zone leaders once a transfer. It is a lot of fun to see how other missionaries work and sometimes its just nice to break away from your companion for the day, even though I have loved both of them so far.

Oh and I forgot to tell you last week. Last P-day 10 missionaries got to sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. I didn't sing but my companion did. We gave him a hard time because his is originally from England :) It was Mormon night for the San Antonio Missions. They are a AA team for the San Diego Padres. It was a lot of fun. We had to leave after the 3rd inning though so we could be home on time.

Yesterday we had a couple of miracles happen. First of all, Carlos didn't show up in time to be confirmed, so we went ahead and did Mary's confirmation. Carlos showed up right in the middle of hers so we were stoked and he got confirmed.

Then we went to the Base to teach our Gospel Essentials class. One of the guys wanted to get baptized. He had an awesome story. He was reading his BOM on the latrine on Saturday night (that's what everyone does because they don't have time during basic training to do much of anything that they want). He was reading a scripture passage that he didn't understand. He prayed real hard for understand. Meanwhile, one of the Mormon airmen got a prompting to go and fill his canteen at the latrine area. He then got a prompting to go to the guy that had just prayed for help. They ended up talking for almost an hour about the gospel. That really goes to show that miracles are still happening all the time.

So while I taught the plan of salvation for Gospel Essentials, Elder Smith went and taught him and made sure he was ready for baptism. I stumbled through the lesson but I thought it went pretty good. A couple of the airmen were returned missionaries so they helped a bunch. After the lesson we were sitting there talking and one the girls in the group approached me and said she wanted to become a member of the church. She grew up in Utah and half of her family are members. She attended church sporadically through her life. Both of these people that want to get baptized are graduating from basic training on Friday. So we have the time frame of Saturday and Sunday to baptize them before they leave to Tech school. We are doing it on Saturday morning.

Well, I hope you all are having an excellent summer so far. Stay close to the Lord and keep reading your scriptures every day.

Love,
Elder Gray