"Spiritually Uplifting Challenge"

To the parents of Elder Nathan Craig...

Dear Brother and Sister Craig,

As you are probably aware Sister Leavitt and I will be released from our mission at the end of June this year. The three years have literally flown by and we will be sad to be saying goodbye to our beloved missionaries, members and non members in Atlantic Canada. The new Mission President will be President Pratt from Orlando Florida. We have had some communication with him and Sister Pratt and we are confident that the area and the missionaries are in good hands.

As you are aware we have had a pretty serious winter. High winds,, lots of snow, cold temperatures and the odd day of sunshine. I have personally declared my independence from the weather but it does affect the work. In many of our units church as been canceled about half the time.. The missionaries ability to travel around, talk to people and knock on doors is greatly hampered when there is a blizzard going on.

In spite of it all the faithful missionareis just press on. They shovel driveways, they shovel sidewalks, they shovel decks and on occcasion they even shovel off roofs. Our motto is that we cannot be stopped.

In this last six weeks we have had a series of 3 one day leadership meetings helping the leaders be prepared for the arrival of the new Mission President. The session have been wonderful opportunities for the mission leaders to improve their leadership, finding, teaching and organizational skills.

In order to help strengthen their testimonies and ability to teach from the Book of Mormon, our missionaries will be reading the whole Book of Mormon in the upcoming transfer. I find that many of the missionaries have studied parts of the Book of Mormon. They have read the whole book but often it has been over an extended period of time and it is hard for them to get the whole story.

In January of 2014 we invited the missionaries to read the Book of Mormon during that month. and it proved to be a wonderful experience for them. At that time we invited the parents of the missionareis to join us in this activity.

Many parents did so and I often got  reports from them of what a neat experience it was to read the Book of Mormon at the same time as their missionary sons and daughters. Some of the parents got into it so much they felt they needed to send me emails reporting on their progress.

We invite each of you to join us in the spiritually uplifting challenge. The transfer starts this coming Monday and ends on June  7. It is 42 days and will require us to read 12 pages per day.

Sister Leavitt and I are going to have our first mission reunion prior to this years general conference. We will have one in Salt Lake City the Friday before conference and one in Calgary Canada on the Saturday before general conference.

I would invite any of you who might want to attend to do so. We will have some food and show some slides and video's of the mission. As well we will probably have a fun program with some of our talented musical missionaries performing.

We  have felt so blessed to have had this opportunity to serve.. More than anything else it has been fun. We love the missionaries and we love the Lord. It is a joy to be in his service. Thank you so much for all that you have done and continue to do to support your young missionary son or daughter. They are precious souls.

Of course we will bump into each other over the coming years.....the church really is very small and we look forward to those opportunities.



With Warmest personal regards,

President Brian D. Leavitt