Congrats!

Big congrats to T and D, J and K and TBA. If you were looking for suggestions, Jenna and I keep trying to convince Rachel and Dustin to name their kid Igor, but I get the feeling they're not interested, so that's open for use.

It's been an awesome week. We had our stake conference this weekend and Elder Ballard, one of the 12 apostles was here. It was incredible to hear from him. They focused a lot on missionary work. Governor Romney is in the stake, so this morning Elder Ballard specifically told him about some of the press he dealt with during his run for office. He said that they went to many speaking engagements and everyone wanted to know all about the temple and why they weren't allowed in there, and what were we being so secretive about? He said, "We have 19,000 chapels and 53,000 missionaries trying with everything they have to drag you all to the chapels each Sunday!" So he explained to them all that the temples are not simply cathedrals, and once they are dedicated for their very specific purpose we ask people who wish to enter to prepare themselves and commit themselves to this work in order to participate. (Once you're inside a dedicated temple, it's not a passive process. You participate in the ceremonies yourself!) He told them all that we have nothing to hide, and invited them personally to attend upcoming temple open houses where he would escort them through and explain to them exactly what we did in the temple. He said many of them flew out to meet him for the occasion. He also said that although it has not been approved, they have thought of the idea of making the temple open houses available virtually, so anyone can go through and see this no matter where they live. They still don't have the okay from the First Presidency, but it sounds like an incredible idea.

On Saturday we had an extra set of workshops just for the young adults in New England. It was really great. We were really focusing on how to share the Gospel with our friends and neighbors and make it more accessible. One of our guest speakers was Brother Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue. Way cool guy. Obviously he's done pretty well for himself, but he's really put that money toward some cool stuff. He said that he just started getting really sick of people finding out he was Mormon, but then when they did the instinctive thing and googled "Mormon," nothing positive would come up, since there was that encouragement several years ago about how the name of the Church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so anything official, or even from an inside perspective wouldn't show up when someone searched for "Mormon." So people would get totally turned off to the Church because of everything they would read on the internet, even when most things were totally unreliable. He said he found this website called fairlds.org that had been posting responses to many of the criticisms and trying to fairly address many issues that had been brought about by all of the negative websites. But this was the only website of its kind. So after making a nice donation to that website, he decided he would join in and start his own foundation. What did his foundation do? They started by buying the rights to 1400 domain names that had "mormon" somewhere in the title, and putting material on those websites that was actually uplifting, rather than argumentative. So now when you search for Mormon, you will have as many opportunities to read positive things as negative. Or that's the hope. It's working very well for websites in other languages. In English, it is sad that mormon.org is not the first website to show up. But perhaps we can start getting enough hits with that website that it will move up the listings.

It was very interesting, and I'm glad that we can use the internet for positive things as often as it is used for negative things. If you wanted to check out his foundation and what kind of stuff he's putting out there, it's the moregoodfoundation.org.

I love you all.
Paz y Amor.