11/10/12

Dear Family,

Well we have had a really cool week. The work here has just been Super fun. The Lord has blessed us tremendously. I want to share a few miracles with you all. So because we are traveling so much, we only have a few days where we can work in our own city. But within those few days, we meet the most wonderful people! We now have two new awesome people preparing for baptism and they are golden! God has helped us out with the little time that we have. If we do our best, he prepares the rest.  We have been working a lot in other cities to help boost them up. We are the Special Ops Elders :P We go in, blitz the city and then leave. We have seen sooooo many miracles from it. This past week, we were in Lelystad. We worked with Elder Burgess and Elder Shoemaker (My son!) It was a lot of fun. We taught 2 new families that night and they are super interested in learning more. One family has 5 kids under the age of 7 and the other family has 3 children. We were super excited for the Elders there.  Elder Shoemaker, has turned out to be an incredible missionary. It's been really neat to check up with him after 1 year. His Dutch is awesome, he is bold and teaches with power. I am proud of that man.

   We had a ward activity yesterday and I learned something. I know why I am back in Amsterdam. There were many inactives there that I knew from before that were active or recently baptized. It was a powerful experience to see them again for both parties ( me and them). One in particular was baptized while I was here the first time. She was heartbroken that all the missionaries during that time were back in America. When she saw me again, she was so happy that she ran up and gave me the biggest hug ( i couldn't move fast enough to avoid it) and then she almost kissed me on the cheek ( i did avoid that one :)) She hadn't been back to church for a long time but we talked yesterday and she wants us to help her get back into things. She'll be coming to church on Sunday. We need to make sure she builds some solid relationships with the members. I hope I can do my part to help in that. There are a lot of great things going on in the mission and in Amsterdam.  President came back from his conference in Madrid. He informed us that starting next June we would start to see the effects of the 18 -19 year missionaries coming in. Our mission is expected to jump from  90 missionaries to 180. SO basically that means that everyone will be training. We are really working hard on stabilizing the mission culture so that when the time comes, we have powerful missionaries training. We have very obedient elders and sisters. Our mission has worked very hard on that. But we'll need to step it up and pass on that culture. Can you believe it? Our mission could potentially double! What a blessing that is.

It was wonderful hearing from all of you.  Love you all! Thanks for the support and have a great week!

Love,

Elder Schulte