Gifts of the Spirit are great and certainly real

Dear everyone,

Hello. It's great to hear from all of you after this exciting weekend. I hope you all are continuing to do well as it sounded so from your emails. I'm excited for Rachel and Tyler! Do you have the name decided already? How cool. And very fun that Paige & Ben made their official announcement - nice timing with April Fool's and all..haha. Thanks Nana for the Easter card, I just got it today. I received the Easter goodies from home; everything is great, thanks a lot. That's great Sarah made cheer leading and Ste is doing well in his sports. It was great to see Jackson's picture from his birthday; I'm excited to get to know this now 'big-boy'. As far as my contract at Alpine, my first inclination is to say go ahead and do a 12 month contract. I don't know if I'll do Spring/Summer (probably?) but it's likely that I'll be working, ideally at the MTC, and won't want to step away from that for a little season like that. That's great you've signed up for some classes - we'll fine tune everything more so in the future. I failed to bring my other memory card with Lois' baptism pictures on it. Next week, sorry. How is everyone coming along with their Book of Mormon reading?

It's been quite the week; it's gone by so fast it's as if it didn't exist. This week ahead will be much more low-key, relatively speaking. I'm going to Rome tomorrow for the day - that will be fun! Too bad Lois isn't home, ha. I loved General Conference so much. You're right, seeing Elder Zwick was awesome giving the prayer. And great memory about Elder Pieper being the one who
interviewed me some months ago; it was very fun listening to him speak. I always feel connected to family while watching Conference as a missionary. There is such a renewing, uniting Spirit that comes as we gather (even if it may be in different locations across the globe) together. It's hard to identify one favorite talk because I loved them all. We were able to get one investigator to come to a session of Conference. She said she got a 'good vibe' from listening to the people speak. Gail was planning on coming to the Saturday afternoon session (which Elder Cook's talk was perfect for her) but cancelled at the last minute. Bummer. With all of the traveling and meetings and Conference this week we didn't have too much time to work in Utica. That didn't stop the Lord's work from progressing, though. At lunch in between Conference on Saturday a guy came up to us asking if we could come over and visit with him sometime, ha. And yesterday night we went over to that part-member Spanish/English speaking family I mentioned before. Only the husband was home this time, who we didn't get a chance to interact with much the
last time we were there. This was great because we were able to teach him directly and get him up to speed with his wife and son who we taught the last time. His Spanish is much better than his English so I taught and talked with him in Spanish. I still cannot believe how these words and grammatical patterns come out of my mouth with the little studying and experience with Spanish I have. Gifts of the Spirit are great and certainly real. I hope you all have a great week preceding Easter and that we all ponder on what the Savior did His last week in mortality. I feel His love in my life and know He lives and cares for each of us. Let us show our love and care for Him.

Thanks for all that you do for me. Happy Easter. I love you.

Love,
Elder Christensen