Veni Veni

The First Presidency Christmas Devotional last night was amazing! The new Bible videos are so cool! You know you're a media-deprived missionary when you treat the announcement of small 5-minute Bible clips like it's a movie premier.

 

We had a good week this week. The lady named Alma that has the picture of President Hinckley is doing well. She was even inviting her friends to be baptized with her. We were a little sad that she couldn't make it to Church because her husband took the car keys with him when he left for work, but she'll definitely come next week.

 

We also had a somewhat frustrating lesson with one of our investigators. He hasn't been praying and so we decided to teach about prayer and invite him to live that commandment and pray daily. We talked about the blessings and consequences of praying or not and how it helps us to grow closer to our Heavenly Father. He agreed that it was a commandment, but when we invited him to live it, he said that he could only "try." It gets frustrating when people use their agency to choose not to follow Christ. One of the big cultural problems we run across in Spanish work is that not a lot of people have a conception of agency or how we are free to act for ourselves and choose our own consequences. A lot of the time you'll invite someone to Church and they say they'll go "if God wants it," as if God is going to magically whisk them away to the chapel on Sunday. There's a lot of people with a lack of personal responsibility for their actions. Not everyone we teach is like that, but it's common enough to be frustrating.

 

One of the adversary's greatest tactics is to get us to not use our agency. It's not enough just to not choose bad. We have to choose good as well. The adversary knows that he can't convince everyone to choose evil, so he just settles for getting us not to do good. For instance, if he can't convince us to fight against the Gospel, he'll settle for getting us not to share it with others. It's hard to remember that sometimes, and it's especially frustrating when your investigators are "neither hot nor cold" as it says in Revelations and so God will "spew them from His mouth" (yikes).

 

In District Meeting we practiced teaching people and not lessons. Sometimes we get a little robotic and we start falling into a teaching style like the old discussions. After that we had an awesome lesson that night where it just flowed. I was worrying less about getting all of the doctrine out and focused more on the investigator.

 

I miss you guys. Christmas isn't quite the same without your family and friends. I'm not homesick, but it's definitely not as fun without your loved ones.

 

Love,

Elder Grasley