Navneet’s Baptism!

Today was a very special day because we had Navneet’s baptism! And it turned out great! The members here in Richmond 1st ward did an amazing job fellowshiping him and running the baptism. We were quite surprised how many members came to the service. This ward in Richmond hasn’t had a baptism in like a year, so the members are super excited to see Navneet join the ward! I’m very humbled for the opportunity I had to baptize Navneet. This was my very first time baptizing someone who is living. The experience of saying those sacred words before baptizing him is so powerful. When Bishop Umbach gave the talk about the Holy Ghost afterwards he spoke about how some of the most powerful words are those of the baptismal and confirmation prayers. There’s nothing quite like being able to witness and be a part of the greatest work on earth. I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity, and the sacred trust that Heavenly Father has given me and Elder Evans with Navneet.

Navneet’s Confirmation

After Navneet was given the gift of the Holy Ghost in sacrament meeting he said this really profound thing to us, he told us that even though he hasn’t committed a serious crime, he felt like this burden has been lifted off of him. Jesus Christ lifts our burdens so that they may be made light. He does this as we choose to follow Him and keep His commandments. The sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost is so powerful and it’s a wonderful blessing that we are able to tap into that power each week as we partake of the sacred ordinance of the sacrament. It’s remarkable that Navneet recognized this power and was able to gain a spiritual witness of it at that moment.

Basically Finding in the Apartment

We had an experience as we were arriving back from our apartment from a member appointment; we ran into a guy that lives just across our apartment room. We exchanged our hellos and asked him about his Sunday. He just said he was resting because he has a night shift at work. But on his way out he said that he hasn’t been able to come to our church but he’s hoping maybe one of these days he’s going to try to see if he can come. We were able to get his number and hopefully we can see him again soon! I can’t say I’ve ever found someone inside the same apartment that we live at; that being said, this is the only apartment building I’ve lived in, haha. Anyways that was just a cool ray of light we say today.

Mega Lesson

I probably had the biggest lesson of my mission today; I think there were like 12 people there haha. 4 of which were non-members. It was so awesome! The two families who were there invited their friends and Navneet! It was so cool to see Navneet there too, and hear from him participate in the lesson. He shared his testimony about prophets, which was super amazing to hear! Elder Evans crushed it with the lesson; he really knows how to teach from the scriptures and simply. He said that I carried the lesson too and did a good job asking inspired questions, which was really nice. I honestly really wish Elder Evans wasn’t going home soon. We make such great companionship. I just really feel like we are so unified in our teaching and trainings. I’m gonna miss him a lot. But I’m glad for the amazing times and things that we experienced together. I also had another amazing miracle after we arrived back at the apartment. I was putting my temple clothes back in my temple bag and I discovered that my ministerial certificate was in there! When I arrived on the mission I just couldn’t find it for the life of me. I knew I packed it!! There’s no way I left that at home, it was the first thing I packed. But I was really happy to see that I still have it. I’m really grateful for all the amazing miracles I’ve experienced this week!

Family History Miracle

My father shared a really amazing miracle family history work that I thought would be good to share here: He was assisting one of our neighbors with her genealogy on her computer. She had a hard drive that had a lot of local genealogy resources saved, but unfortunately she was unable to boot the computer. My father discovered that Windows was having issues booting from the drive but luckily the rest of the genealogy files on the drive we in-tact. He was able to get Windows to boot off of a different drive and once he got into the computer he began to browse the files that were in the hard drive. My neighbor was looking for a very specific file that she saved and she wasn’t sure where it was on the drive. Which was difficult because the drive had many partitions and each partition shows up as a different drive all together on the computer. So you have drive letters C, A, B, C, … all the way down to some drive like “T”. And each of these seemingly separate drives have a bunch of folders that you need to go through. The task of locating this specific file was no trivial task and could take weeks to find. When my dad began checking out what was in these folders to understand what would be the best course of action searching for the files… he clicked on the exact drive and the exact folder structure that the genealogy file was located in that my neighbor was searching for; the very first one. That experience was incredibly amazing for me to hear, and it really shows that the heavenly priesthood is working all around us and assisting us in our day to day lives.