"See most people they raise a family, they earn a living, and then they die! They stop working on themselves, they stop stretching, they stop pushing themselves...and a lot of people like to complain but they don't wanna do anything about their situation!!" -Les Brown
This week was pretty good. It was a little harder than usual. Elder Nelson and I are really working hard on finding new people to teach and to start progressing is the big thing here. After Luis got baptized, we still had some investigators, but none of them wanted to progress so we had to start from almost zero. So our focus has been finding and finding. We started this week doing that and it was a little rough. For the first 3 days of the week nobody wanted to talk to us which hasn't happened for a while in my mission, and we had nobody to teach. So Nelson and I sat down and started reading about adversity and how it is a player in our lives. It's interesting how God gave us adversity so that we can improve and progress, which a lot of times is something that I forget. The only thing we can do with adversity and trials is work through them until they are over and we come out a better person. After those first few days of nothing, we started to find people and good people who wanted to listen and learn more and it was gratifying to see some of the blessings God gave us after the trials we had before.
We are still trying to teach this one guy named Jose. He has been to church around 15 times, knows a lot of stuff, and is pretty cool. But the problem with him is he has a ton of questions which leads to a ton of doubts. He smokes as well but says he can stop smoking if he wants to, and that he is going to get baptized one day, but one day in the future future as he tells us haha because he wants to learn everything. And every time he reads he has more doubts and questions. More than anything he just wants to be super prepared and know everything and be perfect before baptism. So we went the other day and shared the talk that Elder Holland shared in General Conference about how we don't have to be perfect to receive Gods love and mercy. How the only perfect performance in this earth life was Jesus and nobody else. I love how he talks about when Leo Tolstoy wrote about the priest who was being criticized for not living up to the standards he teaches and he says "Look at my life now and compare it to my former life. You will see that I am trying to live out the truth I proclaim. Attack me if you wish, I do this to myself, but don't attack the path I follow. If I know the way home, but am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way simply because I am staggering from side to side?" This life is just all about improving one step at a time and in the end Jose liked that. But still has all these questions and doubts we are trying to help him with.
Much Love,
Elder Christensen
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