Woo!

Parents,

So, our brother, Tony was baptized!!! It was an incredibly powerful service. Tony's young wife, Mahana, gave a talk on baptism and it was very good and she was pretty emotional and made Tony pretty emotional as well, which isn't very common for him. He is just a very quiet and soft spoken guy. He asked me to baptize him, and I was honored to do so. After we got out of the font into the bathroom to change, he just gave me a big hug. It was such an incredible experience. Mahana is returning to activity, Tony got baptized and is now working on some family history to go to the temple with, and they both have their sights on the temple to get sealed in a year's time. Ahh! I love it! It was so awesome... We had an investigator at that baptism to watch as well, his name is Nathan, and he is scheduled for September 29th to be baptized, so far he is lookin good for it. He's come to church 3 times now for the full 3 hours. Things are going great here in Santa Rosa in the Stony Point ward. Elder W and I are doing okay. I love the guy to death, and he is very open to different ideas, but he is kind of a stickler at times too in the sense that he likes things done his way. He just barely hit his year mark this last week I think. But, he's from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. and he went to BYU for a little bit before he came out. He's younger than me though, he graduated high school in 2011, that is pretty weird to think about, also, we are getting missionaries now who graduated in 2012... weird stuff. I'm considered "old" now. Never thought that I'd be on this side of it all.

That's quite frustrating for BYU to lose to Utah... That seems to be pretty typical seeing as we've lost the past 3 years. Great. They'll win once I go back. Good to hear that the Colts beat someone! Woo! Santa Rosa is 49er country, and there are some die hard fans here. Luckily, I'm an Indy and Cleveland fan, and they have no quarrel with that.

We found a LA/PM family this week too! We were out on splits delivering church records to people in the ward that we didn't know or had some kind of change in their membership, and we found a family who let us in immediately. They had a million birds in their house... that was kinda crazy, but they are so solid! The 31 year old who we went to visit let us in and sat down with us. Her dad is a inactive member who has struggled with being an alcoholic for a long time, but has now been sober for a little while. They both have desires to come back to church. Then, her mom is a non-member who is interested and Nicole (the 31 year old) said that if her mom would join any church it would be our church. Also, in that house lives Nicole's brother, who is also a recovering alcoholic and who is also a member, and who also expressed that he wants to come back to church! AND, this brother has a daughter who is 9 who is not a member yet and she wants to be baptized! ALSO in that house lives Nicole's 12 year old cousin who is ALSO not baptized... they all came to church yesterday except for the 12 year old cousin and the brother... Look at that miracle! We are going to start working with them this week... I'm super excited!

Anyway, hope Cocoa Beach is awesome! Enjoy it while you can, because it's gonna go by fast! Go Bucks! Cougars! Colts! and Browns!!!

Love,
Elder Edwards