9/18/2012 LAST LETTER!!!

Hey Everyone! Well, this is weird... It's hard to believe that this will be the last time I will email everyone on my mission. Let me start off by saying that serving a mission is the best decision that I have ever made in my life! I have loved every second of it! I have never been so physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually drained in my whole life until I have been on a mission! But, I have loved it all, because I know that through it all, I have been blessed tremendously. I am so grateful for this! College can wait. My week was pretty good, the weather here has been really helpful, It's been raining a lot here. If not raining, then it's just been really cloudy, so that knocks the temperature down by like 20 or 30 degrees. This week, we had the zone leaders come to town to go on exchanges with us, well I went with Elder Urban again, I figured that it was a nice day that day, that we just walked around town. Well we had some pretty good success! We street contacted a man named Kyle who was getting some stuff out of his truck. We just said hello and started talking to him about random stuff, well turns out that we were out there talking to him for about a hour and he had a few questions about why there are so many churches all over the place ( By the way, there are 132 churches in this area, not just in Lebanon alone ) and he also asked what happened to the church that Christ made while he was on the earth. That was a excellent set of questions! We gladly answered them without any hesitation. We asked him if we could come back and talk to him more about our beliefs and he said that he never knows when he is home because of work, but he agreed!! It was really weird when we were out and when we saw him, because when we left the apartment, a member who lives right down the road from us was also leaving and he offered to drive us to where we needed to go, which was about a mile away. When he dropped us off, we stopped by a investigator and talked with him for about 20 minutes, then we started to walk up the road to see another investigator and as we were walking, that is when we saw Kyle, when we saw him, he just walked out of his house to grab a pack of cigarettes and a bag of melted gummy bears. So doing all of that stuff before literally bought us a 30 second window to talk to him. If we denied the ride to go a mile up the road, or if we talked to the investigator a little bit longer, we wouldn't of seen him!! Pretty cool huh?!?! It's amazing how the Lord sets people in our path at a specific time. He defiantly works in amazing ways. Well, 6 plus miles later, my feet were super sore!!! That was a great day. Elder Ashby and I are doing pretty good, we get along really well, I'm going to be sad when I leave, turns out that his new companion that is coming in is Elder Chriss. If you remember when I was in Owasso, I served with Elder Chriss so that's pretty cool that I know him. This will make Elder Ashby's second companion that I have already served with, and I am his second!! His first was Elder Denton, He's awesome!!! I miss serving with him. Our talks Yesterday went really well, I spoke on the Atonement and Elder Ashby told a story that he read one day. It was about not giving up, it was really good!! It was really weird that that was my last Sunday on my mission. But it was a good one. Well, I thought that this day would never come. Not because I thought I would go home early, but because I didn't want it to come. As my mission is coming to a close, I have learned a lot! I have changed a lot too, in many good ways tho. I know that this church is true and I will never change that. I know that Christ once walked that earth and set up His church with Apostles and Prophets to run it under his direction! I know that after a long period of apostasy, it was restored through Joseph Smith and it will never leave again. I know how important missionary work is and how it needs to continue for the work to spread and I am so grateful that I have been able to go on in this cause. I love you all and I will see you in a few days!! Love always, Elder Daniel Stuart