"Where is your faith?"

It has been a very wet week. Yes, we've gotten a lot of rain and there's a bunch of flooding. Not too much in Comanche, but there's a lake near us, Lake Proctor, which is way flooded and a couple of the bridges out near it are completely flooded over. We were told by a member who drove out there they saw some people just sitting in the road at the edge of the water fishing. We've only had problems with the flooding when we've gone out of town to try and visit some less active members. On some of the county roads, we're basically driving trough a river.

We had a really good, productive week, I think. We had four investigators committed to come to church this week, but only one ended up coming; G. We were super happy that G came to church and the branch just took him under their wings. Unfortunately, H didn't come this week because of car troubles, but I'm not sure if I told you that he got the priesthood last week! We were super excited about that, but were sad this week because he didn't get the opportunity to pass the sacrament yet.

This week in the My Plan course I'm taking to prepare me for going home, I watched part of a talk by Elder Andersen. He talks about a man who reads a talk by Pres. Kimball about how God wants us to start a family. He goes to talk to Pres. Kimball about this. After Pres. Kimball listens to his excuses of not going to be able to provide for children and how he needs to finish going to go to school to become a doctor before him and his wife will have kids, the prophet looks at him and says, "Brother, where is your faith?!" Needless to say, they had their first kid about a year later. But I learned from that how important our actions are in determining how much faith we have. Faith without works is dead and even if we can't see the end result, if we have faith, we'll still move forward according to what God's told us. I feel like those investigators that didn't come to church simply didn't have strong enough faith, but that's why we're here; to help them strengthen their faith. We're all constantly making decisions each day that either strengthen or weaken our faith. So we might as well act on what we know is right and trust that everything will turn out all right.

I love you all!

-Elder Carlson