Chapter 35: If God Only Wanted Us To Go Through Trials For Two Weeks We Would Have Been Born As Butterflies

 

2/23/2021

Well, Elder Gomez put a permanent end to our member relations. Tonight we decided that the best way to connect with the youth (which in six months of being here I haven’t really done) was to engage in their activities with them. Well, we decided to do that before we heard what the activity was, so when they announced that it was dodgeball, we were very excited for the opportunity to build relationships with the youth. Unfortunately, Elder Gomez doesn’t know how to take it easy, though, and threw his 90mph baseball pitches straight into the faces of these Deacons. So we’re never going to get to talk to our youth again, but we had a fun time, and the adults seemed to enjoy watching it as well.

2/24/2021

Today I went on exchanges with Elder Garrard. Elder Garrard reminds me a lot of myself, especially when I was six months out on my mission, and so I really enjoyed getting to spend the day with him. We did a really good job of helping out their area, and I got to run into some old acquaintances from when I did exchanges in this ward in the past. One of the families that we met with tonight Elder Garrard had never met before, so when we showed up I think they were a little surprised about the two new Elders who were sitting in front of them. That was one of the most normal conversations I’d had in a while, though. I was in Garrard’s area, so he was acting as Senior companion. I didn’t have to worry about progressing our lesson along or time limits or any of that, my job was to love these people as much as I could, and I did just that. When we showed up they were all kind-of avoiding eye contact and didn’t really want to talk to us, and by the end it was obvious that they had a huge amount of love for us and wanted us to come back soon. Our lesson with them was incredibly powerful. It was only a few minutes long, but we talked about being spiritually self reliant, and the Spirit in the room was incredible. The dad started to tear up and so did I, and we had more than a nice spiritual thought, we gave the vital words of life to that family. I really loved working with Elder Garrard today.

2/25/2021

Today was a lot of fun. Elder Garrard and I got to teach seminary with Brother Redd. Brother Redd was a model teacher, and we really enjoyed getting to see the way that he ran his class and the way that everything worked. Some of the youth from Monument attend that seminary class, so it was a great joy to get to be a part of those lessons and teach them in such an unusual setting. We then ended our exchanges as we returned to a combined district council. Elder Gomez and I had a few lessons tonight and were able to pick someone up, which we were really excited about.

2/26/2021

Today was very stressful. I just had some repairs made to my phone and they were rather costly, but I have good spending habits so it didn’t end up causing me any problems, but unfortunately today my phone developed other problems. It was a problem with the charging port, my phone stopped accepting charge, so at about 2:00 I called our mission Secretary and told him that my phone would last until the end of the night, and then we would be cut off from the digital world since Elder Gomez’s phone doesn’t accept our SIM card. We were very nervous about what would happen, but fortunately a couple hours later my phone suddenly started accepting charge again, which was nothing less than a miracle. Unfortunately, the miracle came after I had put a down-payment on the new phone part that I would need to get this phone working as soon as possible again, but again, because I’ve had good spending habits I’ll be fine.

2/27/2021

Today was a good day for bonding for our district. We’ve all been here for quite some time, but we took some extra time today to get to know each other which ended up being a nice switch up from our regular rut. Today was also a lot of fun in other ways: Elder Gomez and I watched “The Testaments” between our lunch and dinner breaks. I was never a big fan of watching movies on the mission in Brazil, but that’s probably because people wanted to watch “The Avengers”. This movie had a lot of really tender moments that it testified of Christ, it was an incredible work of art complete with powerful testimony. The lessons that we taught today also went really well.

2/28/2021

Today we had all our lessons for the week. We were busy all day in meetings and lessons and even managed to make a Facebook video in the few free moments that we had.

Today for a spiritual thought I wanted to share a message that we learn from D&C 46:26. D&C 46 talks about several gifts from God. All of these gifts come from the same faith, and while that faith is manifest in several ways, through many different gifts, we can be assured, "And all these gifts come from God, for the benefit of the children of God." These gifts that we have aren't meant to be contained to ourselves, we're meant to share them with everyone around us, so look for a way this week to share your gifts.