Justin's last email....

January 6th, 2014

Mom,

I've had a pretty crazy week. It was great!

I'm down to go to Chili's afterward. I'm just going to be nervous getting home for some reason. I haven't been too hungry for the past week. I've been making myself eat though. So I don't expect to be too hungry, but I'll go there if everyone else wants to go.

I'm super, super excited to hang out with William as well.

So I'll tell you a little bit about this past week. I've had a few really cool experiences.

First of all, the temple trip on Thursday with the Jeppsons was amazing. I was able to see the new temple video and I really, REALLY liked it. I was able to sit next to President Jeppson during the session and I just kept telling him how cool I thought it was. He said that he's been very impressed with how they made it. The trip to the temple was a little crazy. We saw how much Satan didn't want us to go to the temple and the hand of God in helping us get there safely. When Elder Pike was coming up to New Brunswick to drop off his companion and pick me up, they got a flat tire! Fortunately, they were able to get on the spare tire in 15 minutes and get over to our place. We thought we were going to be late. Good thing that Elder Pike had followed a prompting to leave 30 minutes early that morning. We arrived at our rendezvous spot in Secaucus before any of the other missionaries got there. We were really grateful to have been able to get there early so we could make it to the temple. There was a snow storm coming in later on that day so we actually got very little traffic driving into New York City with the Jeppsons. We arrived early enough at the temple that we were able to do some baptisms and confirmations before our session. After the session, President talked to us for a little bit in the chapel. He talked to us a little bit about the sealing ceremony. He pointed out that the wife will give herself to her husband, however the husband will not give himself to her. It's because she is a gift to him. He also talked about how Eve is referred to as a help meet. President clarified that she is not a help mate, but meet. It's that way because she will help us meet Christ. She will help us meet the requirements for the Celestial kingdom. He admonished us to always treat our future wives as the most precious gift. The Jeppsons are amazing. I will miss them a lot. After some lunch, we returned back to good old Jersey! But Elder Pike and I weren't yet ready to go back to our areas. The small spare tire wasn't made to be driven on so much. The mission car coordinator told us that we needed to go buy a new tire before we headed back down south into our areas. So we went to Pep Boys. The church has some deal with Pep Boys, so if there is any problems with the mission cars, we always go to Pep Boys. Once we got there, they told us that there were another five or six cars in front of us and that the wait would be around two and a half to three hours. So we went to a couple stores around the area and just waited for our car to be finished. It started snowing more and more before our car was finally fixed and ready to go. By that time, President Jeppson had called us and told us that he would like us to not drive home in that weather. He told us to find the nearest missionary apartment and stay there for the night. So four of us had to go to an apartment without anything to stay the night in. It was a fun night. We just talked a lot about our missions. We were able to get on the road back to our areas that next day around 2:00 pm.

On Saturday I went on my last companion exchange. I worked in my area with another missionary. He usually works in the East Brunswick English ward, but he was actually originally assigned to Brazil and worked in a Portuguese-speaking area for a little while. So he speaks Portuguese pretty well. It's really interesting because Portuguese is really similar to Spanish. When someone speaks Portuguese I can usually understand most of what they're saying. This other elder doesn't speak any Spanish, but during the exchange he just spoke Portuguese with the Hispanic people. They understood him and then spoke back to him in Spanish and he would understand because of how similar Spanish is to Portuguese! So we both taught together in two different languages, but we did it really well and everyone understood us. It was a really cool feeling to teach in two different languages. Later on that night, we visited a member family. The sister is the Relief Society President, but the husband is less-active. He believes in science a little more than faith. But he's always had a desire to one day be able to have that faith. We were finally able to answer one of his prayers. We originally had an appointment for them this past Wednesday, but President Jeppson wanted to have a final interview with me so we had to reschedule our appointment with them for that following Saturday. It turned out to be the Lord's timing. A day or two after Wednesday those two had a conversation on why he was never able to receive an answer to his prayers. He couldn't figure out exactly why he had never felt that he had received any specific blessings or why he had never felt the Holy Ghost guiding him. Before we even knew about that conversation, I had come up with a specific lesson plan for him. I planned to share Helaman 5:12 which states that if you build you life upon the teachings of Christ, you will receive blessings. It's a promise. Then I shared a scripture in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that talks about how we must be spiritually prepared to receive guidance. Then we shared a few paragraphs from Elder Bednar's talk in the last General Conference entitled "The Windows of Heaven". Those couple paragraphs talked about how blessings can be significant but subtle. We must be doing what we should be doing to be able to recognize the hand of God in our lives: reading, praying, and going to church. It was an answer to this brother's prayer because he didn't know what he could do to be able to recognize the hand of God in his life. We were guided in our planning to share something that would help him realize what he can do better to change his life. It's experience like this that I'll miss a lot!

The departing interview with President Jeppson was really good. He talked to me about the success that I've had on my mission. It really is amazing the kind of impact that you have on people on a mission. Then we talked about me going home and also about my five year plan. He told me to not get married too soon, but to also not wait too long to get married. He said that the longer you wait, the harder it is. He gave me an amazing blessing too. It was a great experience.

Love you!

-Justin