Too many canceled appointments!

Family and friends,

Sometimes life is just tough and you have 2 days during the week
that are completely packed with scheduled lessons from after lunch
until it's time to turn in for the night and then one of those days
completely falls through and half of the other one does. It's tough,
but you deal with it. That's something I love that I've learned from
my mission, that faith is usually shown by how you react when things
don't go the way you planned. Even though that happened we used the
open time to get a lot of good accomplished. We got some good tracting
done and made lots of phone calls. We're trying to meet with more less
actives and part member families so we've been finding them and just
giving them phone calls. It seems a little scary because you've never
met them but when it comes down to it, what can they do to you over
the phone? Luckily we haven't had any of them be too hostile to us
yet! And we've found some good stuff to start working with!
We had a really cool appointment this week with Rebekah. She's 19
and graduated the same year as Elder Lankford and I, 2015. She's been
less active for a while and is going to the college here in town. Her
family used to live here and they all just moved away pretty much so
she's been feeling lonely and she's felt the need to turn towards the
church. She said she doesn't know that the church is true but she does
know the church, meaning that it's familiar to her. That it feels like
home. We were able to help her with a bunch of her concerns! She went
to institute the next day! She'll be out of town this weekend but
we'll get her to church next week. It really strengthened my testimony
of faith as well and I definitely felt some personal revelation that
comforted me. I realized that even though God doesn't always give us a
specific answer to all of our questions, He'll often tell us that
there is an answer and expect us to trust Him. There are so many
people I've met that through away precious doctrinal certainties for a
couple of unexplained curiosities. Doubt your doubts before you doubt
your faith.
Elder Nuffer and Elder Loehr (the Cody elders) are going to kill
us! They're the ones that I did the baptismal interview for last week,
then I did another one for them yesterday, they have another one
scheduled next week and I'm pretty sure there are a few more lined up
after that. Just kidding on the killing us part, it's definitely a
blessing and a privilege to do the interviews! It strengthens my
testimony on the importance of baptism and it inspires me to meet
these people that are making changes in their lives.
This last week was the first district meeting I've conducted and
it was pretty nerve racking, but I got through it! The spirit was
really strong there and many of the missionaries told me how great it
was. I'm pretty sure they were somewhat trying to make me feel better,
but I think it did go a lot better than I thought it did at first. We
have a zone conference tomorrow so I'm free of planning a district
meeting for this week! But I'm really excited to do another next week!

Elder Tippetts