Guess who's back?!?! (Daniel 3:17-18)

February 13, 2023

Guess who's back?!?! (Daniel 3:17-18)

Goodness, it’s been a little while since I have written! So, hopefully you still remember who I am haha! I’m going to be quite honest, I’m intimidated by the amount of things that you have no idea about! So, rather then this whole email being a huge recap, I’m going to do an insanely brief summary that gives almost next to no detail but includes the essential things to know haha!

Our Friend, Suzie, got baptized!
We celebrated Chinese New Year and it was a blast!
I was Elder Jensen’s last companion and we had a great time and I was very grateful for the time I got to spend with him!
I am now in a trio, which is crazy! I’m back with my trainer and friend, Elder Hofhiens, and also with the legend himself, Elder Luo! We are just having a blast!
I am 20 lol
We have friends! God has blessed us so much!

Alright you’re all caught up! So, now I’ll jump into this week and we’ll act like nothing ever happened!

This week we celebrated our friend Bill’s birthday! We got him a nice Nike hat and he wore it the rest of the night and even showed it off on church this last Sunday haha!
We have a new young couple in our ward that just moved here! They’re the Zhao family, and they are awesome! We went to Hotpot with them!
We tried doing street contacting at a grocery store and I didn’t think I was a scary person until that experience. I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea, except this was with people running all directions from me haha!
Super Bowl Sunday just rained and rained the whole day! We attempted knocking doors and offering to share a message during the next commercial break but (shocker) people really were’t all too stoked about that haha! Next year haha! (Go Chiefs!)

Alright, luckily, this week I just had my email handed to me! There are two big things, one happened, and one happens tomorrow! We’re going to start off with the one that already happened. It was Elder Sean Joseph Madsen’s birthday! Let me give you a little bit of a background on Sean. I’m doing this without his permission so, hopefully, he doesn’t care! Whoops! Sorry, Sean!

The high school years were quite the roller coaster for Luke Steadman. There were some ups and downs, to say the least. At the end of my junior year, I was running for student council for the following year. One day, I ran into this guy and his friends in one of my classes. We started talking and they were pretty cool. Well, pretty cool until they told me they were going to vote against me haha! But it was fine. I forgave them and moved on haha. A couple months later, that kid who I met in the classroom (my arch nemesis ha) was also on student council! His name was Sean Madsen. He knows everything about video and I needed to make a video and called him. You’re not here to read the whole back story but, from that moment forward, Sean has been my best friend! He changed my experience around... my senior year was amazing and we were roommates in college! Sean is the real deal and just the coolest!

Now, I’m going to tell you some qualities about Sean that I just love and that I think we could all learn from! Sean is positive... always! You can’t find one mean bone in his body! He is a ball of light 100% of the time. I could come to him on the worst day and he could cheer me up in 2 seconds. Even on his worst day, he could still cheer me up in 2 seconds because he constantly looks for the good. He is a light to everyone around him!

Sean cares deeply! You’re not going to find many more people who love and take care of their family like Sean takes care of his! He constantly looks out for his siblings and his cousins! I’d also like to mention, he always takes cares of his friends! My whole life I have struggled with mental health. In college, there were some moments when my anxiety could spike pretty big. Sean always loved me and would give me hugs on the days I woke up and told him I was off. He’d always humbly say that he didn’t understand what I was going through, but he was there to help me through everything!

Sean looks for the fun in every single moment! I remember one late cold night we were at USU and I was just freezing and tired. That’s when Sean told me we were going to grab his snowboard and he was going to teach me how to ride a snowboard down Old Main hill. I was a complete bum but he rejected my rejection and we were off to the hill haha. I am proud to say that, at the end of the night, I did successfully (and painfully slowly) make it down Old Main Hill. That was one of my favorite nights at USU!

Sean emulates Christ constantly! He holds no grudges ever towards anybody! He also makes sure that everyone feels loved, no matter where we are at or what we are doing! Even when we were in situations where it was out of the way to go see if someone was doing okay, Sean would make sure they were smiling just a minute later! I really could go on and on about Sean's amazing qualities! But, it satisfies me to say that I look up to Sean in so many ways! He’s been there with me in the lows of summer sales and in the highs of filming the coolest video’s ever known to man haha! I love ya, Seany Boy! Everybody, this message is simple... be more like Sean!

Alright, the second part of this letter is addressed to the crazy cool event we have going on tomorrow called Valentine's day! In the words of Elder Luo, “I don’t know nothing about that.” Valentine's day really leaves us speechless. Sometimes it’s because it’s the worst day of the year. Sometimes it’s because it’s amazing and sometimes (in Elder Luo’s case), you just moved here from China and you have no clue what Valentine's day even is!

Valentine's day is all centered on love! And so, with that being the case, I’d like to be so bold as to make a couple remarks about someone I am quite fond of! Abigail Ann Benson. Abby is pretty much my bestest friend in the entire world! For those of you who don’t know Abby, I am terribly sorry because you are missing out! Abby shines wherever she goes, in any situation! Abby is a big part of why I’m in Virginia writing this letter right now! She’s part of the reason I realized I needed to be a worthy priesthood holder because, if not, she’d probably leave me for gone and the moment I met her, I knew that couldn’t be an option! She’s part of the reason I was excited to come out on a mission; she’s part of the reason I’m still out on a mission haha. She’s part of the reason I was so excited to go and make further covenants with God inside of the temple about a year ago, and she’s the main reason I have the smallest glimpse and understanding of how much God loves us by letting his Son come to earth to save us all. You’ll have to forgive me as I continue on because my eyes are quite teary but even if what I write makes no sense, I hope you can read in between the lines and get some sort of message from the madness.

I think leaving Abby to go on my mission was one of the saddest days of my entire life. In fact, I can’t think of a day that was more sad than that one. I know I’m going to see her again, but the thought of being apart for even a month seemed almost incomprehensible. But on that day, I got the very smallest glimpse as to how the departure might have been when Heavenly Father had to say goodbye to His Son as He came down to start His mission of saving us all. Even more difficult, Heavenly Father knew His outcome. He knew Christ would suffer, be rejected, be tempted, be hungry, be cold, and eventually complete the atonement and all of its essential parts that were all incredibly painful. I truly can’t imagine how hard that goodbye must have been, and there were probably times where it seemed that the time they were apart dragged on! What an incredible gift that our Heavenly Father has given us! There is no other Valentine’s gift that could top His; He gave us His Son.

To end, I want to share one last quality I love about Abby. I also didn’t get her permission for this so, once again… sorry, not sorry. Abby trusts in the Lord even when things just don’t make the most sense. Her level of faith is one that I just look up to so much! I’m sure there were multiple times where the apostles of Christ thought, “Sooo I’m following the Savior, but things are just getting more difficult and people aren’t the biggest fan of me.” But there’s a key principle in this life. It’s one that I’m trying to learn and it’s one that Abby has taught me as I’ve been able to hear all about her experiences of following Christ over the past little bit. It's the concept, “But if not." We see this brought up between Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego and King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3:17-18. What’s going on right now is King N (I’m just not going to write out the full name haha) is not happy with these 3 righteous guys. He wants them to worship idols and that’s something these 3 aren’t going to do. Now King N decides to challenge them; he decides to try their faith and threatens he’s going to put them in a fiery furnace and asks them what God would save them then. But even then, the 3 say that they aren’t going to worship any idols. They will only worship God and God only. Their response to the King’s questions is: "If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

The way that I interpret this is, “Yes, we believe that God is perfectly able to deliver us from a fiery furnace, and if it’s his will that we are delivered, then so be it. BUT IF NOT, we won’t serve any other false gods. No, we will still believe in the one and only true God.” Later on these 3 men are saved, the fire doesn’t burn them and they are delivered. But to me, that’s not the miracle and that’s not the key part of the story. Yes, that is a miracle, but the part in the story that sticks out to me is the 3 men's faith. They decided that, no matter what the outcome was, they were going to believe in God until the end. They had faith in God, whether they were saved or not. Whether their prayers would be answered right then how they wanted or not, they would believe! That, to me, is the message of the story!

My best friend Abby has been the best example to me of this, Thank you so much Abbs, I love you tons:)

There are going to be times where things don’t go your way... where you feel the heavens are closed. Where you feel your prayers are bouncing right back to you. In those moments, it’s going to be easier to walk away and take the easier road and close off the relationship! But for those of you who are trying to come back and those of you who are engaged in the struggle right now, I’d like to end by sharing one of my favorite quotes from Elder Holland:

“So, if your prayers don’t always seem answered, take heart. One greater than you or President Kimball cried, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If for a while the harder you try, the harder it gets, take heart. So it has been with the best people who ever lived” (from Elder Holland's talk, The Inconvenient Messiah).

I hope you all have an amazing week! God loves you! He gave us the greatest gift we could possibly ever have! Have faith in Him. He loves you!

Happy Valentines Day:)))

再见,

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