E-mail received 2/8/2010

Dear Family,
We actually just missed the blizzard. We didn't get any snow thankfully. The storm only hit as far north as Hackettstown which is only like twenty miles away! We got really lucky though. I was really sick but now i'm all better. it was just a cold. The cutting the belt worked only now i need to cut it again. I can't wait to see pictures of Maleah with braces! I'll send the pictures of the baptism along with a couple other pictures today. With the expansion we are going to be inheriting about 40 missionaries so it'll be an interesting move. transfers are next week so it's likely that a lot of the missionaries will start getting moved into the new areas.  This week was actually a really great week for Elder T and I. We taught 43 lessons! That's more than double what the standard missionary teaches! We worked our butts off for it and we definitely saw great blessings from dilligent work and not wasting an ounce of the Lord's time. One cool opportunity that I got was to meet the S's this week. They're an old couple who live in Sparta right on Lake Mohawk and they've been together for over 63 years! We visited them and we saw that they had just gotten a shipment of china dishes and we immediately offered to help. They're great people and they've been through everything together. They were highschool sweethearts and she waited four years for him while he was in the service! Great people. Brother S said something about the church that i really liked. He said, "Our church will always be leaps and bounds ahead of other churches because of how we treat other people. You treat everyone you meet like they're your family. The moment you elders walked in the door you asked how you could help us and that is family like." The knowledge that we are all children of God and treating each other with the utmost degree of kindness and affection is the greatest thing we can do to show others the love of God and bear our testimony of it through the silent actions that we do for other people. Another interesting experience: We were in a teaching appointment that was going very well when a ring at the door came. In walk two people from the Faith Baptist Church in Sparta. I thought to myself," Oh boy, this outa be fun." We exchanged pleasantries and we talked for a little bit. Apparently they had been visiting the family for a while and they were just stopping by. They were nice enough to us for a good five minutes until he said something that I knew wouldn't end well. He said, "You guys read from the Book of Mormon while we prefer to read only from the truth of God." As soon as he said that I thought to myself, "Ok Elder Guinto, time to buckle your seatbelts!" He started into a huge tyrade about how we were preaching evil and sedition to the people, right in front of our investigators! He said that we were teaching darkness with light and we were creating division in the hearts of the people we were teaching. I stood there and listened as he kept going on about how evil we were and then he started attacking Joseph Smith. He said that he was a lier and that God doesn't talk through angels and all this kind of stuff. He started getting more and more aggressive with his comments and even his companion, who was a girl, looked pretty nervous about some of the things he was saying and the accusations, which of course were false, he was making. There were so many times when I wanted to jump in, show him he was wrong and refute him but everytime I felt like i wanted to jump in the Spirit told me," Don't you dare! It's not worth all the work you've done here!" Though my entire body shook with anger at the slanderings he professed against the Lord's annointed I excersised every measure of restraint within me to keep myself from knocking the kid out! (Which i could've easily done, he was a small asian teenager.) He ended his tantrum with something to the effect of he respected me as a person (which of course didnt mean much when he ended with) but he hated and despised everything that i stood for and did. They left and we sat down and our bewhildered investigator asked," Why didn't you defend yourself?!" As soon as she said that I knew why I didn't. With every stroke and evil-speaking we took without retaliation it was a testament to her who was a true servant of God and who fought to tear down the riteous doctrine restored to us by a loving Father in Heaven. As Christ took the stripes and slanderings of an unriteous people and still stands as the standard of riteousness and truth so does the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, and God's holy prophets stand persecution, mobs, armies of sin and columny as the great standard of truth against all opposition and all odds. The truth of God goes forth boldly, nobly and independent and will until it has penetrated every continent, visited every chlime, swept every country and sounded in every ear. We told her of the power of our testimony and the testimony of Joseph Smith. Of no matter what any power of heaven and earth says or does we cannot deny the manifestation of the Spirit within our hearts and the events of the Restoration which did in reality happen. I testify that our testimony of the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is our most powerful ally against any foe and any trial. The truths we hold dear can get us through any storm the adversary seeks to put in our path and as Elder Jeffery R. Holland so beautifully put in the last session of general conference a testimony for which Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, and many other persecuted and tormented saints died for. This is my testimony, the Book of Mormon is the most true of any other book and if not the very words of Christ and if President Thomas S. Monson is not the very prophet of God called on earth to minister unto his children in this day and age then man would be without hope and without compass to guide us through what would be a pointless and frivolous life. But we know that we have a Heavenly Father who loves us beyond our understanding and we know these truths to be self-evident, irrevocable, and above all undeniable. This is the truth, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.