20th Birthday...

Dear friends and family,
   
I hope everyone is well and that they enjoyed the weekend and partied hard on Sunday night for my birthday by doing "Sabbath Day" things haha. Sorry I was unable to write yesterday. One of the sets of Elders in our ward was moving apartments and they needed to be out by today of a house that members rented out to the missionaries a few years ago. A word of advice to all of you, do not rent your house out to the church for missionaries to stay in while you are gone. Unless you request only sister missionaries, because the missionaries assigned to that house for the last 8 months completely wrecked it. Holes in the wall, melted curtains, and bad smells everywhere. So many damages have happened to that house and now the family is coming back to live in it. I feel really bad for the family so we went over there and spent p-day helping them move into their new apartment and clean up the place a little.
   
So... my birthday. I’m not going to say it was my best birthday I’ve ever had, or the second, or third. It was probably they 20th best. But it’s because no one really knows me in my new area. The worst part about it is only 3 missionaries remembered it. I even stood up at the pulpit on Sunday and put that it was my birthday in the talk and I had 2 super old ladies tell me happy birthday out of the 300 people present. Oh well. I guess birthdays are not really that important in the end. I am really grateful to The Cazier family and Grandma and Grandpa Stewart for sending me packages. Also to anyone else who sent one but it came back. It was my fault. I accidentally forgot to tell my dad that it was apartment #509. The only reason that Erin and Grandma Stewart's packages got here is because they sent it through US mail and the mailman knows us. So they got lucky.
   
My talk went pretty good. I got to talk last even though I was the youngest missionary to speak, and we were supposed to talk for 10 mins each but the 2nd missionary took like 3 so I got to speak for 17 mins which was pretty nice. I’ve gotten to that point where I can’t write a talk under 15 mins anymore. I feel like I did really well with the Spanish and got many compliments on it. I’m getting better and better every day. I felt like I might have thrown down a little too hard at the end there. The topic was how to do missionary work through your example. I read the story of Ammon and Lamoni, shared the scripture in Timothy 4:12 about being an example to members as well, and to end it all off I shared the story in Alma 17 or somewhere around there where Alma is talking to his son Corianton and says that because of the example he set for the Zoramites and how he committed a sin and he says. "And when they saw your conduct, they did not want to believe in my words" or something like that in English and just said that we all need to watch how we act and what we do because people are always watching and the saddest thing is when someone we find will not listen to us because of a member of the church and something they did. I think they got something out of it.
   
Other than that things are moving. We found some new investigators this week and are on the path to getting people we can teach regularly. Elder Hurst and I are getting along really well. Hope you all have a great week.

Love Elder Stewart