Man, goodness gracious I feel like singing all the time!! I love working my tail off and showing the Lord that I love Him. I love you mom and thanks so much for your love. It has been raining a ton here and its been awesome, I love it when it floods it just makes life more exciting, haha.
This week was a great learning week as far as the natural man. In the talk about being chaste by Elder Bednar it is one of the greatest talks about the plan of salvation and why we came to earth ever! I love it so much and I find many treasures of Knowledge as I read it again and again. I love the part where it explains if we never felt human passions, or hunger we could not learn self control. If we never got a head ache from waiting we could not learn patience. We really needed a body, I can't imagine all the knowledge we would have missed out on without a body. We really needed to come here and prepare and learn to control it all.
All of the attributes of our spirit are amplified through a mortal body, relationships, ability to choose, and tons and tons more. It is just so cool. Every single day I am trying to memorize more scripture about overcoming the Natural man, for example right now I am memorizing Doctrine and Covenants 121:34-46. And every single night I ask myself "did I put off the natural man today and how can I do better tomorrow?" If the purpose of life is to gain a mortal body and to put off the natural man and obtain Godlike qualities in order to prepare ourselves to dwell with God again; then I feel it is definitely worth asking myself everyday that question and following up and using my agency to stay close to the Lord and put it off a little more at a time through the atonement every day. If we do not learn and grow everyday then that is such a waste of a day that God has given us in order to learn and grow and prepare to live with Him again.
As far as the work its going pretty darn amazing, I feel absolute peace and joy when I ponder whether or not I am giving my all to the Lord. I am learning so much about how to get people to want to know or to find people who are ready and willing to accept the message. In the movie Alice and Wonderland, Alice comes to a fork in the road or something like that and she asks the cat which road she should take. The cat asks, "where do you want to go?" Alice responded with, "I don't know." Then the cat said, "Then it doesn't matter which path you take." That scene from the movie is definitely summarized and not at all word for word but that's the basic jist of it. So, as far as people we teach, they won't care what we have to say until they have somewhere they want us to take them, or that they think we could help them get to. So I took the list from Preach My Gospel the Book of Mormon section called "questions of the soul" and wrote them down on a piece of paper and took it to people who were not progressing. I allowed them to read the list and pick the question that stood out to them most and was a question of their soul. Instantly they gain much more interest and willingness after finding their question and this has helped absolutely everyone I brought it to.
As far as the work its going pretty darn amazing, I feel absolute peace and joy when I ponder whether or not I am giving my all to the Lord. I am learning so much about how to get people to want to know or to find people who are ready and willing to accept the message. In the movie Alice and Wonderland, Alice comes to a fork in the road or something like that and she asks the cat which road she should take. The cat asks, "where do you want to go?" Alice responded with, "I don't know." Then the cat said, "Then it doesn't matter which path you take." That scene from the movie is definitely summarized and not at all word for word but that's the basic jist of it. So, as far as people we teach, they won't care what we have to say until they have somewhere they want us to take them, or that they think we could help them get to. So I took the list from Preach My Gospel the Book of Mormon section called "questions of the soul" and wrote them down on a piece of paper and took it to people who were not progressing. I allowed them to read the list and pick the question that stood out to them most and was a question of their soul. Instantly they gain much more interest and willingness after finding their question and this has helped absolutely everyone I brought it to.
I am going to use it to find more investigators. For example, I would walk up to someone and ask for a favor, the natural human response would be to ask what they could do to help (especially filipino) and then I would ask them to read the list and see if a question stood out to them as something they have often asked themselves. Then when they chose their question I would explain that we have the answer and would love to teach them. Thus we are fulfilling their own desire to know and not just our desire to teach. We will see how it goes, we haven't had to find much lately because our schedules are full but if we do this week I will let you know how it goes. It totally helps people open up and ask the questions that they have just been too shy or afraid to ask and help them start their journey to find truth.
Love, Elder Blackham
Love, Elder Blackham
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