Birthday Week!

Good morning!

   The weather has been so HOT here lately, I can't stand it. Sometimes I'd much rather be in the good old cold! But I'm surviving. I can't find a good word to describe this week. It's been pretty good! Thank you for the ties, they are all super sick. and thank you for the pocket watch, pops! It is so sweet and I've pretty much showed the whole ward. They are all super impressed with your talent, and most of them think I inherited the talent as well. If only that was true, haha. We celebrated my birthday with a few of the members, it was lots of fun. Sister Zhang from Beijing gave me a silk wallet from the Yunnan province of China... it's so cool! She and her family just moved here from Utah... but they were in Beijing before that, thats where they found out about church. They know Elder Han from when they were back in Beijing. Her son just graduated from the law program at BYU and got a job out here, so pretty cool. And I got lots of Hongbao's from the ward (money :)) I also got a tape from the Lenhart fam for my birthday, probably the funniest and best thing of my life!  It has definitely been a good birthday week.

    We've been struggling finding people to teach lately, and the people we are finding are really unstable. We have one baptismal date for this month, Leo, we're really praying he'll make it! He and his mom have been investigating for a little bit of time, and he wants to get baptized, just lacks the drive to come to church and be sincere. I think if we can get his mom to commit to baptism with him, things will go much smoother.

   I don't know if you guys remember this, but in my 1st or 2nd transfer I talked about an old man that we would go visit, Brother Shao. He had been less active for a really long time, but after visiting him for a while he decided he wanted to go to the temple with his wife. Well, this week his wife got up to bear her testimony in sacrament meeting, she started crying and said that her husband had just passed his interview with the stake president to receive his temple recommend, and they're going to the temple to be sealed at the end of this month. Man, I haven't felt that much joy in a long time! It was so good to hear that. So happy for them.
  Well fam. I love you guys. It's been good 20 years... 

  Thanks for everything! Have a good week!

Love, Ben.