Chapter 50: Taxation by Cinnamon Rolls

6/8/2021

Today was a lot of fun. We had a district council and I offered to play one of the hymns that I know pretty well so that we could sing a new song instead of only cycling through the same four hymns that our other piano player knows. I wish I could say that I did an amazing job, but it turns out that playing with people singing is harder in just about every way than I thought possible. I played through “We Thank Thee O God For A Prophet” completely as a refresher and I did it really fast and played perfectly the first time. Then when everyone joined in I realized I was going too fast so I slowed down and did a horrible job of playing, I made so many mistakes. Oh well, good thing I only have to live with my embarrassment for one more week since next week is the last time that I’ll see some of them.

6/9/2021

Today was a great day, we ended up getting to be a part of a service project today. We talked to the family we were doing service for afterwards, they invited us to sit down and we had a mini lesson outside of our service. The family was really surprised to hear that we weren’t getting paid at all to help out, but were in fact paying to be able to serve them. We had a lot of fun with our lessons and were able to stop by the young men’s activity tonight. They made cinnamon rolls, and so we got to eat cinnamon rolls for our “missionary activity” tonight. This form of taxation is great, we need to hang around the young men more often.

6/10/2021

Today we had a bible bash with three different pastors at the same time. Obviously that was not the ideal situation to be in, that’s the type of situation that you avoid at all costs, but looking back it was pretty funny. We had a member come along with us, which might be why that pastor invited other pastors as well. Jake was the person who we were really there to meet with, and I think he felt like he had to put on a show for the other pastors at how good at defending his faith he was. Unfortunately he wasn’t very good at it. He threw old questions we had already answered with him at us and so we just re-gave him the answers. We were pretty disappointed afterwards because Jake had been progressing a lot, but it was obvious after that meeting that we would not be going back.

6/11/2021

Today we had another lesson with Deanie. We talked about the first vision and gave her a copy of the Restoration 

Proclamation which she seemed to really like. The whole situation was pretty awesome because we were able to invite her to the church and we held our meeting there. We took her on a tour around the church building and she seemed to really love it. We had our meeting with two different couples as well: The Klines returned for another meeting and our Ward Mission Leader and his wife joined in as well. The lesson was a little difficult to guide, but we got to the end, which is all that matters.

6/12/2021

Tonight we had an activity called Ward Fun Night. It was an activity that was meant to be a social opportunity for the families, especially the younger families in the Ward. Unfortunately we only have a couple of “younger families” in this ward and only one of them showed up, which wasn’t great, but that one family is having a baptism tomorrow so they brought all of their friends from out of state which made the activity much bigger, in the end, than it normally would have been. Our lessons today went very well, and we had a lot of people asking for help with doing missionary work which was really cool.

6/13/2021

Today we had Ward council, and Ward correlation. The goal of one meeting was to talk about how the missionaries can help the Ward, and the goal of the other was to talk about how the Ward can help the missionaries. There was a baptism that happened today for one of the little boys in the Ward, and otherwise we spent most of our time with Bishop. Bishop was teaching the lesson which we attended, and we spent a longer amount of time at his house than usual. Bishop’s kids were gone and trying to maintain attention with them is always a struggle since there are a couple of youth who really don’t want to be there, but Bishop and his wife have incredible testimonies, and so we got to have a meeting tonight that was unhindered by anyone who might not want to be there.

Today for a spiritual thought I want to share a verse from 2nd Nephi 31:

7 Know ye not that he was holy? But notwithstanding he being holy, he showeth unto the children of men that, according to the flesh he humbleth himself before the Father, and witnesseth unto the Father that he would be obedient unto him in keeping his commandments.

One of the ultimate attributes of Christ was his humility. His humility is shown in every aspect of His life, and especially during His Atonement. One of the greatest ways we can learn humility is by obeying the commandments as we strive to become more like Christ. The commandments, combined with Christ's Atonement, are our stepping stones to perfection.