John: 5/21/2012

From: John Schouten [mailto:john.schouten@myldsmail.net]
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2012 11:31 AM
To: Julie Schouten.; Jordan Schouten; Mike Schouten; Mike Schouten
Subject: The Usual 5/21/12

Well this week was a sort of strange one.  We were able to mow our ward mission leaders lawn.  That was a lot of fun.  I haven't really mowed a lawn for AGES!  It's been forever and nobody out here on the east coast knows how to mow a lawn.  Not very many of them look very good.  But after we were done it looked really good.  I enjoyed it.  We also had almost all of our appointments with investigators fall through or they weren't able to meet with us this week.  But we did have some good things happen.  We got a media referral for a guy named Joel and we went and saw him yesterday and he's a good guy.  He's 22ish and he's made some bad decisions and he says that he doens't want to go back to that lifestyle and that he wants to get closer to God because he really doesn't know anything about Him.  We talked with him and helped him learn about God.  He accepted a baptismal date for the 5th of August and he prayed at the end of the lesson!  Not very often does that happen.  It usually is pretty hard to get anyone to pray let alone a guy we had only known for 30 minutes. 

We weren't able to see Kurt this week.  On Thursday, the day we usually see him, he had a lot of stuff that he had to do so we're going to be seeing him this week.  He is still doing well.

We also had stake conference this week.  It was a really good conference.  They talked a lot about keeping the youth active and strong because they had a statistic that said only 10% of the youth in the stake served missions.  So they want to boost that up and keep the youth strong because that is a time where Satan works really hard to have people fall away from the gospel.  It was a really good conference.

I also got to play basketball this last Saturday morning and I realized that I'm getting a little rusty.  I came back and I was slightly sore in a few places.  It was crazy.

Well it's going to boot me off.  Love you all.

Elder John Schouten