January 2, 2017 - Lumberton, North Carolina

Happy New Year family and friends!!! I can't believe it's 2017! Time just goes by so fast! I hope you all had a fun time ringing in the new year! This week has been really great! We found out transfer news on Saturday.........we will both be staying in Lumberton. It rarely happens that companionships stay together for 3 transfers so it was quite a shock to us!

This week, the work in Lumberton has really been moving forward. We found several new investigators and many of them have very solid potential!! A couple of them were former investigators that we just tracted into. On Sunday, one of those new investigators came to church!! His name is Danny. He used to take lessons from the Elders a year or two ago. He never made it to church because the Elders didn't ever arrange a ride for him. We were able to get someone to pick him up and he came!! He said that he really enjoyed it and that he plans on coming back! We set a baptismal date for February 11. It has really been amazing to see so many miracles take place here in Lumberton!!!

This week, I began to read The Book of Mormon again. The other day, I read about Lehi's Vision. It made me think back to an article from Elder Bednar that I read. In this article, he talks about the 4 different groups of people that are in Lehi's vision. The four groups of people are: those that did not even seek after the tree of life, those who pressed forward and commenced on the journey but did not use the iron rod, those who were clinging to the iron rod, and those who were continually holding fast to the iron rod. The first two groups of people never even made it to the tree of life. The last two groups made it to the tree, but one of those groups were ashamed and left the tree after eating the fruit. Only one of the groups stayed by the tree and that was those people who continually held fast to the iron rod. The story of Lehi's Vision teaches us that we need to be continually holding fast to the iron rod or in other words, we need to be consistently reading, studying, and searching the scriptures. The scriptures help us to know more of what our Heavenly Father would have us do. They help us to ultimately come closer to Him and returning to live with Him. As the new year begins, we should all make it a goal to do better at continually holding fast to the iron rod.

I love you all so much!! I am so grateful for everything you do for me! Have a great week!!

Love,

Sister Paynter