I love you all so much! I'm sorry that this letter might be a little bit short today, there's just never enoughy time to do everything!!
This last week has been such a miracle. I love Hermana G. so much. She's such a powerful teacher and the Spirit is so strong in every moment it really amazes me. I love working with her. She's also been a huge help in teaching me all the responsibilities of our assignment. She's always telling me little tips for what to do in the exchanges and things like that. I'm excited to get to apply them in our exchanges that we'll be having this week.
This whole week has been a blur of activity. Getting to know the area, the ward, contacting tons of people and going to all sorts of really inspiring meetings. The ward where we're at right now is a really large, strong ward that has a lot of desire to do missionary work, which is a huge help. Yesterday we had our ward council and it was so powerful. It's amazing what a small group of people can accomplish as we work together.
On Thursday we had our Leadership Council with President and Hermana Rowley that we have at the beginning of the month with all the sister leaders and the zone leaders in the mission. It was a really neat meeting. We talked a lot about having the faith to be obedient and to be able to work miracles in our missions, and to help the other missionaries recognize that and also work with the ward members and help them to have the faith to help us too! I loved that. There's a part in PMG that talks about the Attributes of Christ and one of them was faith. As I was reading it in preparation for the leadership council, it really struck me that faith is really just acts that we do according to the love that we have for Jesus Christ. It helped me to understand that we all really do need to have charity, because our love for Christ is the roots of the actions of faith that we're willing to do for Him.
We also talked about gossip. Hermana Rowley did a really good job of helping us understand that gossip is really unnecessary and how we can change our perspective to avoid it. She showed the clip of Pres. Uchtdorf's talk where he said just STOP IT. It was really good. On Friday, the zone leaders asked Hermana Garcia and me to talk about that for the zone meeting. I loved being able to teach about that because it helped me to reflect and see how I could personally improve. We talked a lot about how in the mission (and really in life in general) we're all imperfect and we're all looking for more opportunities to change. As we seek to change and improve, we hope that people are willing to forgive and forget what we've done in the past and instead look at what we're doing well now or what we're becoming. But, a lot of times it's so easy to forget to do that for other people. We ended up talking a lot about the Atonement and that really it all comes down to that. If we believe that Christ gave His life so that we personally can change and completely forget our past, then we have to be willing to believe that His Atonement also applies to everyone else around us too. We're all in this life to keep improving, and the only person we're hurting by not forgiving and by gossiping is ourselves. I really learned a lot.
Anyways, it's been an amazing week and I hope it's been for you guys too. I hope that if you've felt impressed to change something while reading this letter, that you can have the faith to act and to change it. I love you all so much and I want you to know that I know with all my heart that this church is true. I love being a missionary and I know that this work is the work of the Lord.
Love,
Hermana Garner
No comments:
Post a Comment