September 15, 2013

 Things are going absolutely great!! I just am so so so out of time. There is no time sometimes I sleep in my proselyting clothes and its just an adventure:) We are having good success. We just had a less active family come to church and they hadn't gone to church for years, so that was awesome and we also have a date for them to be sealed as a family:)!! I am so excited for them:) We got some great new investigators this week and a lot more are progressing so thats awesome:) 

The talk by Elder Holland in the Liahona is so awesome about the justice and mercy of God:) I like how he said that "nothing in this world will ever hurt you more than what you do not know." At first I felt in my heart that I wanted to say that that was not true but then I pondered it for a moment and realized that it is absolutely true. For example if you don't know what a commandment is, you cannot follow it. I thought about the many people we taught, especially about the law of chastity, that say that they wish they knew these things sooner then they would not been in the situation they are.  A knowledge of good and evil allows you to make proper decisions that can save your life; but, without it you are almost bound to mess up. Those who don't know smoking is bad, or not knowing the effect of our decisions will cause us to make those decisions.  You can't get out of a bad situation or change your life. The list goes on of the simple truth of not being able to do things if you don't know how:  managing money, being happy. I also like how he explained that bad will never evolve into good. Just like a math equation you can never fix a false answer by simply going on but you must go back to the point that you messed up at and start over from there and life is the same:) 

I also liked the talk about Christ like mercy. I think that out of all the perfect attributes that God has, I think that one of them that I appreciate so much, like so so so so much, is His mercy. His ability to say I forgive you; go and sin no more but not just once, but over and over again, because we will always discover more of our weaknesses, and more sins as we seek to become more like Him. Yet again and again if we have a broken heart and contrite spirit He says "thy sins are forgiven thee." Out of everyone we hurt, the people we hurt the most when we sin are the one that love us most, the number one being that loves us is God, He gets hurt the most because its another reason we can't return to Him. I love that He loves to forgive:)

Out of all the invitations we give people as missionaries, the best has got to be the invitation to repent:) We don't have to remain the way we are, things are not hopeless because of repentance:)

 

Love, Elder Blackham