Hello everyone,

It's been another crazy week. We've been in and out of the hospital all week with one of the sisters, but she is finally doing physical therapy and starting to do a lot better. Speaking of hospitals, I don't think I ever gave you a good update on Sister Howard. President told us that a few weeks ago she had a 105 degree temperature for 32 hours and a pulse of 126! If that wasn't bad enough, her kidneys had shut down and half her heart wasn't working right; like she had a heart attack. It was pretty certain that she was going to pass away but now she is actually walking a bit and getting back to normal. She is even supposed to be at our meeting next week. I guess everyone in Utah is talking about it and how it really was a miracle. It's pretty amazing what some faith and the priesthood can do.

This week we also had an awesome baptism for Jessie. After she got baptized, she talked for about 10 minutes about how thankful she is for the gospel and how much she loves this church. It's been amazing seeing her progress in the gospel. She loves the gospel so much and is trying to learn more and more all the time; I think her scriptures have more markings in them than mine do haha. We've also got some other investigators that we hope will get baptized in July.

Two weeks ago, we were walking down the street looking for a referral when we heard an 18 year old girl yell at us in English "I wanna hear the good word of God." She was totally sarcastic and people are always yelling stuff like that at us, but this time I felt like we needed to talk with her so we went back. It turned out that she is a friend of the referral that we were looking for. So they (Cathy and Jello) are progressing now and actually came to church on Sunday. The only problem is you never know when you might have a crazy speaker at sacrament meeting; like we did last Sunday.

The first talk was awesome and really spiritual but the second speaker wasn't so good... She got up and started asking questions to the congregation! When I say "asking" I mean she expected answers back. She started to say stuff like "What day is it?" (it was independence day) and "What year was that?" or "When did the Spanish leave?" and she got the congregation to start shouting answers back at her. Cathy really enjoyed it so she started yelling answers too. It was a MESS! It was the most disruptive and irreverent sacrament meeting I've ever seen; just a ton of people yelling answers at the speaker. It felt like we were some other religion where people stand up and yell “praise the LORD” haha. It is always an adventure here.

Love, Elder Smith