Hey! Wow, I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome it was talking to everyone and seeing everybody’s faces and what not. Those truly were some precious minutes. They go by way too fast. I hope you enjoyed the French. It was cool being able to share a little something like that with you. The end of the phone call is always a killer… but really my love for you grows even more. I am so grateful for the family that I am a part of. Here in Cameroon you see a lot of dysfunctional families and I am always reminded how blessed I am to have the family that I do and that we all love each other. We are so blessed! I wish I had more time… every time I finish a call I feel like people get jipped on time and I wish I could have spoken a little more to Ashlyn. It made me a little sad to hear that she wanted to read me something. I would have loved that so much. But I am sooo grateful for the time I was given to talk with everyone. Those are some of my happiest memories on the mission… talking with my family. I love you all so much :) I am sorry to hear about Brother Brown passing away. It sounds like he was an incredible example of charity and service. I loved your little story about helping him out a little with his Christmas lights. Service is amazing… there is no other way to put it. The only consequence of true service is happiness and joy… on both ends. I love serving so much!

This past week has been amazing! I love working with Elder Thibault so much. This past week was so effective. A week ago we had 0 baptismal candidates and now we have 3! They are all set for June 2nd! I am so excited! Elder Thibault was able to ask all three of them and commit them to baptism. It is so awesome seeing the Spirit of the Lord working through him. I am always blown away by how effective he is as a missionary. His French is still coming along. He is exactly how I was when I first got out here into the field. I always thought about how I probably didn’t even attribute anything to the lesson and what not because I couldn’t speak French, but I don’t think I could have been any more wrong. After working with Elder Thibault for a week I have seen the exact opposite. New missionaries truly are such a treasure. Our investigators here are ALWAYS learning and growing whenever Elder Thibault bears his testimony. I love working with him! We have done so much good over this past week. He is such a goof ball. His humor is always making me laugh and have a good time. Elder Thibault and I were in a taxi going back to our apartment and I was sitting in the front seat just watching the life around me as we passed by and all of the sudden Elder Thibault was talking in the back and he wasn’t talking to me… he was contacting some guy in the back seat and presenting to him a Restoration brochure! It was awesome! He was struggling with the French but in the end the message got through and the man contacted totally understood. I turned around so that when he finished I could bear testimony and support everything he just said and I looked at the man and it was this militant man with a huge AK-47 on his lap. Atta kid Elder Thibault! Speaking of French… I had an interview with President Jameson yesterday and he had me say the opening prayer in French and afterwards he commended me on my French and went on to tell me that he considered me fluent. I was pretty shocked to hear that coming out of his mouth… but he was a college French professor for over 30 years… so I’ll take it!! That made me feel so good. The gift of tongues is real! You are totally right about my desire to change my attitude and be a happier person… so that is why I don’t like to focus on the negatives in my emails. A mission is a miracle and I am so blessed to be out here… there is so much good I could share with you but I never have enough time… so why would I share the bad? The only thing I could ask for is to always pray so that I can have that Christ-like love and patience. Really, with those two things there won’t be any bad experiences. I have been working on those two attributes a lot lately and I have found so many blessings and it has really helped me become a better missionary. So I hope you understand why I don’t really talk about struggles and what not. There are always struggles… but there are ALWAYS more miracles and blessings.

This will make DJ laugh… I went on splits with Elder Nash the day before Elder Thibault got here and we met an ami de l’église and her name was Christianne. That was the first time I have ever come across that name… and DJ always gets a kick out of it when he calls me that… but that’s okay. I guess it comes with old age, finding humor in weird things :)

If I could ask for one thing, it would be this. We have an investigator whose name is Serge. He grew up in Yaoundé in a life of sin. He came here trying to escape his life and start over but it has still been hard. A few days after he arrived here in Douala, Elder Spens and I were contacting in this new quartier that we had never worked in before. We thought to ourselves, “Hmmm, lets give this one a shot.” So we started contacting… going door to door asking people if we could share a message about Jesus Christ… basically what I presented to you yesterday in French. We weren’t finding much success… we handed out a ton of brochures and what not but you can see in the peoples eyes if they are interested or not. They will tell you until they are blue in the face that they are interested but the Spirit of the Lord will never lie… and he won’t waste His servants time. So an impression came to me… look for people sitting down in front of their house relaxing… so I mentioned that to Elder Spens and he said okay so we started looking for people who were just sitting down in front of their houses. After passing tons and tons of doors we saw ahead two people just chilling… so we went directly to them. And guess who we found… Serge. Just a few days before that he realized what kind of life he was living and decided to do something about it and change. So he came to Douala and was searching for the truth about anything that could help him spiritually and mentally. And just a few days later we showed up. I know with all of my heart that we were directed to Serge and I know that the Lord knows that we can help him. The Lord wants Serge… and that’s why he sent us to him. Serge is a strong ami but I want him to be stronger. I still have some doubts about him enduring to the end. So I think you could all help him out sooo much by simply praying for him… pray for your brother Serge. Thank you so much!

Well, that’s all I have for today. I love you all so much and I thank you so much for your emails. Don’t ever worry about your long emails. I love them so much!

Je vous aime,

Elder Schmid