Another week gone by, and August is upon us! Man this mission thing goes by quick. Once again, nothing too interesting happened this week, but I do have a few spiritual insights/experiences. So this Tuesday, we helped the Bishop a little bit more with the drain in his house. We started digging out the path for the drain from the outside, through the middle of his living room. It was pretty easy going until we got to the foundation. I know we use this analogy in the church a lot, but man it´s true. The foundation was about 10 times harder to break then the rest. I was hacking at it for like...2 minutes and I was already dead tired. We all took turns working away at it but it seems like we were never going to get through it. This is exactly how we need our own spiritual foundation to be. When we use Christ as our rock, and build our foundation upon Him and his teachings, it will be much harder for the adversary to break through. Something interesting though - after lots of hard work with the right tools, we eventually did break through this small piece of the foundation. So even when we have our foundations set - even when we have a strong testimony and we feel safe, we must always be on the watch. Satan is always working hard and tying to break little pieces of our foundation, and unless we continue to endure and persevere, he can and will break through our foundation. So how do we keep our foundations strong? One of my new favorite scriptures of late gives us one of many answers:
"Yea, and I also exhort you, my brethren, that ye be watchful unto prayer continually, that ye may not be led away by the temptations of the devil, that he may not overpower you, that ye may not become his subjects at the last day; for behold, he rewardeth you no good thing." Alma 34:39
We must always be watchful, we cannot afford to be caught sleeping. And we must always remember - Satan will not reward us with anything good at the last day. Only guilt and regret.
But yeah, it was a good week. We contacted a few people we had met in the last few weeks, and taught some good lessons. We had a family night at the church on Thursday, and brought some less active kids and their friends. It was good, but way too many kids. Kids are the easiest to teach and bring to church, but without their parents, it´s hard for them to stay active. So we´re trying to find/teach the parents of these kids to bring more families into the church. But yeah, these kids loved the activity and came to church on Sunday as well. But it looks like they´re going to move to another city which is too bad. But we´ll continue working with them and their parents and get them excited to go to church in their new city. We also got a referral from the Bishop of a return missionary who has fallen away from the church. He is living with his girlfriend right now, but told us he wants to get married and bring her into the church so that´s exciting! They look like really good people, and him being a return missionary will help as well! It seems like people always pop up out of nowhere to teach on the mission, in the most unexpected ways! Of course we are always trying to find new investigators, and I think the Lord sees our efforts, and rewards us with the elite. It´s so cool to see the Lord directing His work firsthand! So this weekend will be the baptisms of Luis and Saria, along with two baptisms of 8 year olds, so it´ll be a Dunkfest! And Cristiane could be baptized as well, she just has to make a firm decision first. Should be a great week!
I´ll end with another short spiritual thought. Sometimes I feel like I have a lot of faith and I really try hard to show it by doing what´s right, keeping the commandments, reading my scriptures, helping others but without results. Sometimes it feels like my efforts don´t bring the results I want and I get a little down. So this week my comp and I were reading the sciprtures about hope in PMG. I read in Moroni 7 which says
40 And again, my beloved brethren, I would speak unto you concerning hope. How is it that ye can attain unto faith, save ye shall have hope?
41 And what is it that ye shall hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal, and this because of your faith in him according to the promise.
This was a clear, forceful response to my questions. Sometimes we have faith, but we don´t see how faith helps us in our lives if we don´t have hope. I realized I had begun to lose hope and I was not looking at the future, only the present. Something interesting is that to hope is the same word as to wait in portuguese - esperar. We must always be patient, and not look at our present situation, but how our situation will become one day. Sometimes it´s hard to keep our faith up, but we are promised eternal life through the atonement of Christ if we continue steadfastly. God sees all of our efforts and our faith, and will reward us. Maybe it´s not today, maybe not even in a year, but one day we will live with God again, as long as we have continual faith unto repentance and endure until the end. So keep it up, and continue, as President Hanks would say - Steadfast in Christ! Love you all so much! The church is true and God loves you! Have a wonderful week.
Love,
Elder Waitch, Weitch, Witch, Wait, Waght - pick your favorite.
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