Emails! I had a tea party for the 4th of July!

Here we are again, sending emails and what not! The weeks have been starting to feel like days and the days just feel like really long hour blocks! It is a really weird feeling! Things are going great though, the Lord is hastening his work as we always say! The mission has been split and I'm no longer a missionary of the West Indies Mission but a missionary of the Barbados, Bridgetown Mission! President Mehr is now home probably riding his Honda Gold Wing all over the place (he always talked about rides on his Honda Gold Wing). I would always tell him that my dad and I were going to go on a ride with him on our Harleys, he always got a chuckle out of that! :) We now have the new mission president, President Herrington and we are looking forward to meeting him tomorrow! He is coming to have a meeting with us as with every other island, he is doing a tour of the mission! He speaks French as well so we are hoping to see him a little more often that how often we could see President Mehr! We will miss him and his wife as there were such powerful examples for us! So things have been changing I guess we could say!

So this past week was a pretty good one and definitely an interesting one! Things are going good for us, we are working hard and trying to keep our pace on the incline instead of the decline. I haven't been finding it a challenge to stay focused or anything like that. The challenges I've been having lately is staying diligent when things fall through and still working hard. And also having patience towards my weaknesses! I've been learning a lot working in this area of the Lord's vineyard and the Lord have been teaching me very valuable lessons. Patience being one of them. :) We just started teaching a young man who we were blessed to have been able to set a baptismal date with and we are going to work hard with him to make sure that he makes it to his date. He just started a summer job working the weekends so that is a biggest immediate challenge. There is another girl that we have been teaching, her name is Vanessa, and she has a challenge getting to church as well. So we have some work to do in that area! We found a couple new people that are great potential investigators! We had a lesson with a lady whose name is Shanna and she understood the Restoration so well! It was incredible! She was explaining everything to her boyfriend so that was pretty cool! We are just trucking a long! I had a cool experience with the fast yesterday as I finished fasting by reading Helaman 3:35 and I came across the last line which says "sanctification because of their yeilding their hearts unto God". So I thought about that for a little while and Doctrine & Covenants 4:2 came to my mind. "Oh ye that embark in the service of God, see that ye serve him with all your heart, mind, might and strength that ye may stand blameless before God at the last day". It is evident to me that I must put all I have on the altar of God and just go to work and the Lord with bless me! It was pretty great!

I just received a tie from the Weese family, Thank you very much for your love and support! :) Thank you for the emails and prayers! I pray that the Lord will bless you with a great week! :) I love you all! Elder Packer will be missed! Have a great week! Elder Peterson