Week 16

Hola,

Summer here has ended and everyone is going back to school.  This is great news for us in regards to teaching families with small children, but is terrible for trying to teach our young adult investigators.  This week I've been trying to be like the Prophet Mormon.  I'll explain that though in a little bit as always.  

This week we had Stake conference, which was pretty cool.  The speakers here focused on how parents can help teach their children correct gospel principles so that they can gain a strong testimony of the truths of the Gospel.  The cool part though was that I got to direct the stake choir and congregation.  

Speaking of this, I've learned that planning doesn't mean the same thing here as it does in the states.  This choir that I directed was made entirely of the missionaries in the stake, and we were asked two weeks before.  We didn't know what songs we were going to sing though until one week before, and given the missionary schedule, we only got to practice twice.  Also, during our second/last practice, we were asked to perform an additional number.  Long story short, I learned that the Lord's work does extend to choir rehearsals, when in doubt about how to make a song sound cooler, just repeat the last phrase with a retardando, and tone deafness is a chronic illness that is running rampant in Mexico.  The important thing to focus on though is my first point in that the Lord's hand is in all parts of his gospel, including missionary choirs.  I say this because I really don't have any other idea how we were able to pull this off in such a short time.  

As I said earlier, I've been trying to be like Mormon.  I say its because I just finished my faith edition to my Elder Bednar Library, and have recently been studying his epistle in Moroni 7, which talks about faith, hope and charity.  I've found in my personal experience that many people find this to be a confusing part of the Book of Mormon, given that when trying to analyze all three of these points, people often think that they are all interdependent upon the other, and that one can't have one of these traits without the other two. This assumption of course makes it difficult to utilize this scripture to teach about either three of these traits without leading some one to believe that their faith is inadequate due to a lack of charity - or some other similar problem.  By studying only faith though, it is easy to tell that this isn't the case at all.  Rather, the confusion lies in Moroni's presentation of the epistle.  

In Mormon 7, nearly all of the chapter is dedicated to the topic of faith.  He only briefly mentions hope, more specifically what to hope for, and then talks about the blessings of charity.  Based on this structure, it is easy to see that the main focus of Mormon's epistle is to talk abut faith, and how faith leads us to receive the gift of charity.  

To better explain this, I'll use an example and follow the same train of thought used by Mormon.

Let's say that someone is about to receive a priesthood blessing to be healed from an illness. We all know that for this to work, the recipient must have faith in the healing power of Christ.  This faith is expressed by actions, which could just simply mean to ask for a blessing.  If we have faith, and our faith is properly placed in Christ, then we must have a hope for the power of his resurrection, and the power of his atonement.  After all, Christ has the power to forgive sin and heal infirmities through the power of his infinite atonement, which without we would all be a lost and fallen race, subject to the whims of the devil for all eternity.  But through the power of Christ, we can have a hope for a better life, free from sin in the presence of God.  

Now, what Mormon fails to talk about in this chapter is that our faith in Christ, and hope for his atonement will lead us to repentance and baptism to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.  However, this part of the doctrine could be explained in his need to be meek.  Or in other words, to rely wholly on the merits of Christ as taught by Paul.  

The power of repentance, will eventually change us from a carnal and devilish person, the natural man, into someone that seeks after the things of righteousness, or in other words, a disciple of Christ.  In other words, what Mormon is stressing here is that true discipleship will lead to a change of heart and charity, which is the pure love of Christ.

In other words, to call ourselves disciples of Christ, we must have faith in his power and hope in his atonement.  These will lead to a true conversion in Christ which will lead to the development of Christ like attributes including charity, which is the greatest of all.  If we aren't exercising our faith unto hope and repentance so as to develop Christ like attributes, we can't call ourselves by His name.

That's all for now

Elder Gooden

Week 15

Hola

So this week I've been trying to be like Jesus as always though, I'll cover that in the later end of my email.  

This week has been amazing!  I had my first baptism on Saturday which was awesome.  It was a nine year old kid named Rayez.  It was awesome to be able to do such a cool thing like that, and I learned a lot about the nature of the ordinance from having to memorize it for a second time in Spanish.

In other news, the ward that I'm in has nearly doubled its attendance since I arrived here (though this isn't hard to do when membership is as low as fifty people)!  The people here have been so friendly and welcoming that it's been easy to talk to less active members here about the importance of attending church.  It's also been interesting to see how my companion and I work together.  In a lot of ways, we are very similar.  We both like to study and read the Book of Mormon, and have each read it several times.  We both tend to lose track of small things that end up being important further down the road.  So it's been an interesting learning experience to basically see myself through a mirror.

As for why I've been trying to be like Jesus, I've been thinking a lot about why I'm here on my mission.  One of the things that I've learned here is that my mission is about the last place that Satan wants me to be.  And because of that, I've learned a lot about how he tries to tempt missionaries.  One of the most common things that he likes to do, at least with me, is when it's been a rough day with the language or when all of our appointment fall, he likes to ask the question, why are you here?  If you are truly a missionary, why don't you have the gift of tongues; why don't your investigators keep their appointments; one of your investigators is sick, if you have the priesthood, why don't you heal them?  In other words, he tries to get us to believe that there is no power in our calling, and challenges the legitimacy of the message of the gospel.  

But I also remember a talk that Jeffery R Holland gave at an MTC devotional, when he asked the same question of why isn't salvation easy.  His response was: salvation doesn't come easy.  It was never easy for him [Jesus Christ] why should it be easy for you?  and then I remembered a scripture in Mosiah 14: He is despised and rejected of men.  A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.  And we hid as if it were our faces from him, he was despised and we esteemed him not.  Surely he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows.  But we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.

I also remembered that it's his name that I am wearing on my chest, and that I've been called to be his representative while here on the earth.  And so, this scripture has a very true message for missionaries as well.

We are despised and rejected of men; more often than not, people don't want anything to do with our message, some people even have anti-Mormon feelings.  We are men of sorrows and acquainted with grief; it's always sad when an investigator decides to stop progressing, because we know how much this message can help them.  And they hide as if it were, their faces from us; it's always a little annoying whenever we can hear the TV on inside a house but no one wants to answer the door.  We are despised and they esteem us not.  

Surely we have bore the griefs our our investigators and carried their sorrows; we have spent countless hours in fasting and prayer over the well being of our investigators.  

And so, I've learned that being a representative of Christ means taking the good and the bad.  But just like the bad parts are rough, the good parts are really great.  Take for example the ordinance of baptism.  One of the things that makes baptism so unique, is that it is the only ordinance that I can think of that is done in the name of God and Christ.  All of the other ordinances that are performed in the Church are done in the name of only Christ.  Everything from prayer to priesthood blessing, to temple ordinances is done in the name of Christ.  But baptism is done in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  The only other time within all of the scriptures that this is done, is when Christ atoned for all of our sins and died on the cross.  And just like the atonement makes of free from sin, baptism symbolically cleanses us from sin.  And so I thought that that was a pretty neat comparison.

The last thing that I want to talk about is the Abrahamic covenant.  For those of you who don't know or remember, we read in the Bible that God covenanted with Abraham, and that one of the signs of the last days is that this covenant will be fulfilled through the restoring of the lost tribes.  But we often forget, just exactly what that covenant is, and that it is the purpose of the church to fulfill this covenant.  as for what this covenant in tales, we need to go to the book of Abraham.  In there, we read that Abraham was baptized, received the priesthood, and was sealed in celestial marriage, as explained in the bible dictionary, the covenant that God made with Abraham was that all of his posterity would have the opportunity to receive these covenant blessings and the possibility of exaltation.  Through baptism, all of us are adopted into this covenant, and have the responsibility to bring others into this covenant so as to restore the house of Israel.  If we aren't striving to make and keep the covenants in the Abrahamic covenant, we are apostatizing.

That's all the time that I have for now.  

Elder Gooden

Pictures from this week . . .