How are you? I hope you guys are doing good because I sure am. This week like every week has been spiritual, hard, and funny. I believe I will relate these three adjectives in reverse order.
For several months now I have been dedicating the majority of my study to researching by topic. One day for example, I will look up all scriptures and missionary related church doctrine that have to with Prophets. The next day I will study about how people interpret Matt 16:13-19 ´´Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church´´ as how Christ founded his Church upon one of his apostles. Another day, it might be about the baptism of Jesus. Through doing this I have But when I am studying like this, I often come across funny scriptures of which I would like to share a couple with you.
2 Kings 19:35 ´´And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.´´ I interpret this as the Assyrians rose in the morning as dead corpses. Thus a biblical account of zombies. :P
2 Kings 2:23-24 ´´ And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.´´ Moral of the story being that if you make fun of the hair of holy men, you will be eaten by a bear. :P
That is all for now. I hope you liked my random verses.
So we were having lunch in a member´s house and they have two kids. One is six and one is two, and they love to act like ninja´s. The two-year-old was using his blanky like a whip and it got wrapped around the legs of his brother an he tugged. His brother fell over and the toddler turned his head from the ground toward us ever so slowly with a look of pure evil that I don't think the joker could pull off. My companion and I were dieing of laughter for the next five minutes while they continued to do arial kicks and Dragon Ball Z punches until lunch was ready.
This last week was hard because we have really had trouble keeping investigators that are actually progressing. We always are finding new people, but the majority of the time they aren't truly prepared to accept the message. People are not willing to read, to go to church, to change and I feel temporary sorrow to see them lose all the blessings that they could gain. So we are changing our approach to finding and teaching to try and cut those who are not willing as early as possible. We have become more direct with our questions and I feel myself truly growing as a missionary. We always are reevaluating re work to try new things and become the best we can. I believe I have finally come to accept that some people just do not want to change and that we cannot convince or force someone to do what is right. The desire has to come from within. We can not help cultivate what does not exist.
That is not to say we are not seeing success. We are working with several investigators to move towards marriage and baptism and we hope for a baptism this week.
Last night, my companion and I were talking about deeper doctrine and how I like to look for an answer in the scriptures before asking for help. We then started talking about a topic that I just could not find anything to back up my point of view and so I prayed asking to find the scripture I was looking for. I had given up and we started prepping for bed when I opened up a book from the church right to the topic that we had been talking about! I found what I was looking for when I had stopped looking and shared it with my companion. It was a simple answer to a simple prayer that reinforced for me, ´´Ask and ye shall receive.´´
I have been dedicating a sizable amount of my time to improving with the lesson about the Restoration of the Gospel and every time I improve with a section it seems as if I come across a person that day who benefits from the improvement I made. It is wonderful to see the Lord´s hand guiding my study and making me stronger. I am so happy to be here serving the people of Brazil. My professor in the MTC always said, ´´Smile, it could be worse.´´
Come on really,
Elder Healy
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