Tractin in a winter wonderland

Hey hey hey my friends and family,
How are things back home? Is everybody safe, happy, and healthy? Anything new and exciting going on in the Utah or wherever else anybody has been? I'm loving being in Harlem, as always, and things are going really well in every aspect of the mission. Last week we found 3 new investigators, and taught 19 lessons!!! It was a really, really hard working week but as we can see if we show the Lord we are willing to work, He will indubitably bless us. None of our investigators have decided to be baptized yet but we are hoping a couple of them will be soon. A lot of times people don't meet with us once or twice and want to be baptized, except for a few people, most of the time it takes time to search, ponder, and pray about baptism and accepting all that it entails. A lot of the people I talk to who have been converted to the gospel took months or even years to find out for sure that they wanted to be baptized. This gospel is a learning and progressing gospel, we are all on different levels of knowledge, experience, and even commitment but that does not make any of us better or worse then anybody else. It is the purpose of life to continually utilize the Atonement to progress and become better, ultimately becoming like Heavenly Father. We also are supposed to help our heavenly brother and sisters to progress, without one anothers help and experiences it would take us a long time to progress. We have been given the oppurtunity by our Heavenly Father to interact one with another, as we interact we teach the things that we have learned, and also we learn from what others have learned. Its amazing to think of Heavenly Fathers plan for us and how it is so 100% perfect that ALL of us have the chance to recieve exaltation.
So anyway we have been fighting the northeastern cold for a couple weeks now and I am finally getting used to it. Yesterday the weather was pretty nice and it was only about 35 degrees and we were just walking around with our coats open and no hat or scarf or anything. I never thought I would get used to freezing cold weather but I guess when your serving the Lord a lot of things happen that you don't expect. Including having dinner with the guy who signed the backstreet boys. Haha thats right last night I had dinner with Ryan Wright who is a member of the church and he also works for sony. A couple of years ago he was in Korea and came across this boy band that everyone was starting to like, he immediately signed them and now they are world famous. If you want you can all go to www.mormon.org and look up his video. He is really cool and also a very spiritual guy, his friend Jean-Baptise lives in our ward and he was over at his house when we had dinner with Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste is also a very cool guy who is from france and has a great conversion story, that has to do with Ryan introducing Jean to the gospel and slowly but surely helping him to learn more. So as we can see member refferrals do work to bring people to the gospel, I hope you will all think of friends or even family that you could talk to and invite them to have the missionaries teach them. Well I love all of you and hope everything is going great.
Love
Elder Shepherd