May 21

Momma,

 

Thanks for all of your missionary quotes! I really enjoyed them, and I"m glad to hear your doing better. :) I DO actually have a bit of consolation for you, but it might be something you already know, and I can't remember for the life of me which general authority it was, but at one point in church history SOME general authority made the statement that as long as a family is sealed in the temple, any wayward  children will eventually come back to the fold, whether it be in this life or the next. You should look up who said that, and when, for me. :)

 

Well. let me tell you a bit about my life then. These last two weeks have been SO busy! We've seen more miracles than I ever have before, like strangers coming up and asking us for lessons. Not just one, but two. One woman flagged us down as we were leaving our apartment, and said she'd like lessons from us. Then she asked me for my planner and wrote down her information in it. The next day we got a phone call from an unknown number, and some dude said the missionaries left a card on his door TWO YEARS ago with a phone number, but he hadn't had a phone until just now. So he called us back. On top of that, a woman that I met last week requested a book of mormon off mormon.org this week, so we get to go teach her too. It's really proved to me how little control we as missionaries have over our success, and how much it's in the Lord's hands. :P So that's cool

 

We've also been dropped by a bunch of our huge potentials, so it's not ALL good, but it's still been pretty good. We also met a woman who was baptized in '88 and then went inactive and moved. She called the church and asked us to come over and see her, and she claims she was baptized a "mormon", but from the bit we've been talking with her we think she MAY not have been baptized in our church..... Her story contains some interesting details, and she says she's never seen or heard of the Book of Mormon before. But she said her church taught about Joseph Smith..... We can't be sure until we send a request to salt lake for her membership record, but I suspect that she was baptized with the RLDS. Hmmm. Did they change their name?

 

Alright, spiritual thought. We, as humans, have a tendency to get distracted. We get carried away in whatever little things our life holds for us and we lose sight of the really important things in life. Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy. Elder Richard G. Scott said in a conference address that (and I'm paraphrasing here) if you get too focused on working, even if it's serving the Lord, you can't feel the spirit. Elder Bednar said if you want to follow a prompting "be a good boy, or be a good girl, keep the commandments, honor your covenants, and don't worry about it." We, as Latter Day Saints, get so STUCK on trying to be the best! We're always fretting about whether or not we're good enough, we're always beating ourselves up about missing a prompting, or not being spiritual enough. The council of these our apostles of the Lord is simply this. You can be completely confident in your knowledge that you're doing the will of the Lord when you're just trying to be good. If you're worrying about it more than that, you're missing the point of life, the joy of it, and chances are your reading too far into things that aren't promptings, and missing some of the ones that are. My message? Don't worry about it. Just do good. :)