Little Lion Man

I'm tired of this hot weather. I feel like it's finally taking its toll on me physically. Fortunately, I've heard I've got just a few weeks left until it starts cooling down. It's weird, but 100 degrees seems really cool to me now. It's weird how your perspective changes like that.

We had a pretty average week. Nothing too fantastic. We're still working on getting some other people on track after our baptisms a few weeks ago. We have one lady that might get baptized in two weeks. She's been working really hard to overcome a lot of obstacles that have been in her way. It would be awesome to see her be able to finally get baptized.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the basic principles of the Gospel. The most basic you can essentially get is that God is our Heavenly Father, we are His children, and we can communicate with him through prayer. Almost everything else falls into place if we can just remember those key principles. It's something hard to always remember though. It's hard to remember our divine potential, as well as that of those around us. Preach My Gospel gives an example about how to talk about the family that I really like. It starts with our earthly families and how we inherit traits from them. Then it talks about how we also have our Heavenly Family and how we equally have a spiritual inheritance given to us.

I've thought about that. We all do receive those traits from our Heavenly Father. Our talents and abilities don't just come from our nature here on earth, but we also have certain talents and abilities given to us before we came here. We had a lesson last night where I shared that and I felt really good when I said it. There's just something so important about realizing our relationship with God. Because of that, I've been trying to improve in my prayers. If we really feel like we're talking to our Heavenly Father, I've found we draw closer to him. It's still not a skill I'm very good at.

I like how simple the Gospel is. I think we overcomplicate it. I definitely did before my mission, and I still do, only less now. The Prophets and Apostles are good examples for us. They always seem very simple and basic when they speak. They obviously have a vast doctrinal knowledge and probably know a lot of very interesting things about the Gospel, but they choose to speak on the simple things that are really most important.

Love,

Elder Grasley