Happy Thanksgiving!                                                                                               11/25/12                                    

How was your holiday? This week was really great and packed with A TON of food. My goodness I thought I was going to burst. We started the day was a few hours of rugby, and it was a blast. I am way out of shape and my body still aches, but is was such a good time. We then went to Sister Longs and met her daughters and Marcie and her family came and we got to meet the rest of her family. It was a lot of fun and Marcie's family was rattling question after question, we are having a lesson with all of them tomorrow night. After having a good time with them we went to the Frosts for a meal until the Roots. It was good food and company. The Roots then had a prepared a good country WV thanksgiving. It was awesome to eat with them. The day before we had come by and taught Christina.

We knew going into the lesson that she needed an understanding of the blessings of the gospel and her potential as a daughter of God. We prayed that the Lord would grant her a vision. We taught a good lesson from the scriptures, and towards the end, she asked if she could have a blessing of comfort. After the blessing, she was kind of speechless, and then began to cry. She said," when you gave me that blessing, I suddenly saw myself walking down a dirt road, not really sure where it was headed, and then I saw the Lord. He was calling me towards him and I kept walking and was shaking off Temptation and things that Satan was throwing at me. That has never happened to me before, I have never seen anything like that." It was especially incredible, because we didn't mention anything about vision to her before or during the blessing. We left their house giving thanks the Lord had heard our prayer. The amazing thing is that she is acting on it. She came to church today for the first time and hadn't smoked all day. She continues to read every day now and plans to be baptized at the end of december.

Today was an amazing day at church. All of our investigators came, so we had 9 investigators there. The Lord truly is hastening the work. The family that referrred themselves came for the first time, and we will find out this week what they thought of the service. John McDonald keeps plugging along, and I hope to see him baptized before the end of December.

We exchanged with the elders in Roanoke this week which is a 3 hour drive, so I got a good 12 hours of driving in 40 hours. And Elder Klain had his wallet stolen so I have been doing lots of driving, :) I am definitely grateful for the amount of pondering time I have. Today I had to teach an impromptu gospel essentials class because the teacher didn't come, and a lot of it came from things I had been pondering about. I am super happy and thankful for all the blessings we are seeing.

Love yall and see you soon

Elder Dumke