Two days to Christmas countdown. It's going to be so weird to skype haha.
Tuesday we had a great trade-off. I went with the soon to be late Elder Wall. We had planned a good long day of finding people to teach. We were able to walk a few miles through Little Mexico which was fun and more or less productive.
Wednesday we got a call from someone we had talked with about two weeks prior. We meet this lady after we got stood up at an appointment and were walking around to see if there was anyone in the area we could talk with. We started talking with her and offered some service and were able to rake her lawn. We had a good conversation with her and shared "Light the World" with her.
Light the World---learn more about it (great videos and ideas for making Christmas more meaningful)
She asked us if we could help her to delivered some Christmas packages with the community organization she represented. We jumped on the service opportunity and meet her at this random retirement community. It turned out to be really fun. We delivered Hams, pastries, and Christmas packages to a bunch of people.
The same day I also felt inspired to study "Living water" as found in the scriptures. Throughout the simple study I was thinking about spiritual self-reliance. My favorite scripture from that study was found in D&C 63:23 which says, "But unto him that keepeth my commandments I will give the mysteries of my kingdom, and the same shall be in him a well of living water, springing up unto everlasting life." Obedience is prerequisite for most of the blessings in the gospel, but what I found interesting is symbolically the well of living water source is from within someone. One can go to church and have to appearance of being spiritually powerful, however more important is the little achievements one does privately. Gaining a strong testimony or praying daily is not something public, but these things are personal achievements that lead to large and important consequences. Once you stop doing the little things it's like you stopped watering a plant, it doesn't immediately die but will slowly loses its strength and withers. Your faith decreases and you lose the understanding or testimony you may have had at one point. We had a great experience this week catching a member who is going through some trials with their faith and we were able to read with them. Just reading with members can be surprisingly important to helping members build their faith.
Zone conference was Thursday. It was really, really good as usual. President Brennan's remarks are almost always the highlight. He spoke on angels and their role in God's work as well as miracles. He pulled examples from almost all the standard works including, the Bible, Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine & Covenants. It was really interesting and he made the point that God works in one way and that doesn't change. We also watched clips from the Christmas story film "The Nativity." It was really interesting but the acting was not that great. On top of the acting the Angel Gabriel was a little freaky. Elder Wall made the joke that when people have angelic experiences they tend to be scared at first and that this was why.
Friday we had the first practice for "Oh Holy Night" with the Reed family. I'm accompanying them on the piano and it sounds pretty good.
Turns out when you ask someone if they can count when they don't have a musical background to know that you mean beats in a measure when it's 6/8, they might be slightly offended. Oops haha.
No comments:
Post a Comment