Email: How Blessed I Am

Hello to my wonderful Family,
                     I hope this email finds you all doing very well. From the emails that I have gotten it sounds like this past week was pretty crazy. Well ya know I wouldn't expect anything different from the last few weeks of summer in the Payne household. I am really glad that baby Sara is doing well. I have been thinking a lot about the recent additions to the Payne family and it is just such a miracle that we have two brand new little babies that are doing so well. The miracles seem to just keep coming. I am so grateful to the Lord for blessing me with such a wonderful and supportive family. I have been contemplating that a lot lately, just how truly blessed I am. The reason that it has come up and I have been thinking about it is because I have quite a few investigators that are really struggling right now with their families. One person is a girl who just recently had her two kids taken away from her. Her ex-husband came and took them away because her husband has some custody. The problem is that he took them all the way to Wyoming. She has been really distraught because of it. She started questioning everything that she has been taught and she is just in a really rough spot right now. We went over and talked a lot with her, mainly that we need to look at the eternal perspective of things. That when times get tough, that is the time that we need to really lean on the Lord for help. We seemed to help her feel at least a little bit better towards the end of the lesson. Now second the other family that is going through a rough time. It is the family that just recently had the mother and the Son baptized. They are just going through a really rough time as well. The husband is currently trying to quit smoking a he is having a really rough time of that as well. He is extremely stressed and as you can imagine it is not easy to quit smoking. He has been trying really hard to quit for a long time and it hasn't worked yet. So right now they are having a lot of financial hardship. I feel so bad because I wish there was more that I could do. We are just constantly reassuring them that the Lord is going to help them and just to have faith in him. So like i said I have been expressing a lot of thanks in my prayers to my Heavenly Father because of the wonderful family I have. Along with that i want to wish Mom a very Happy Birthday this week. Thank you so much for always being there for me. I am so blessed to have you. I know that i can always rely on you for help. Thank you again. Well I love you all very much. I apologize that this weeks email was sort of jumbled and crazy but that was sorta like my week. haha i love you all so very much. Also before I forget thank you very much for that package. It pretty much just came up out of the blue and definitely brightened my week, especially the Superman ring. i actually ended up wearing it to church on Sunday. It may just become my new Sunday ring. I love you all  once again.

Love Elder Payne