Happy to report on another fantasmic week of missionary work.
I think it was one of the harder weeks of the mission -
Mostly due to the CRAZY weather lately... floods every day!
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| Every. Single. Day. |
But I am happy to say that I am doing my best to live after the manner of happiness :)
The people here are such a great example to me. They live with this weather and never complain. They just deal with it.
They are happy even with three inches of water covering the floors of their homes.
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| Wading through water in the house! |
It makes me think about all that we have been blessed with where most of us live. We should NEVER complain.
And as far as missionary work....don't you even worry. We go out to do the work NO MATTER WHAT!
We splash, wade, float and even swim to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to whoever will listen.
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| Here's one creative way to avoid soaking our shoes.....again. |
Saturday was a crazy storm. Monday was an even crazier storm.
IT WAS SO AWESOME.
Well, I guess I shouldn't say it was awesome because everywhere just floods when storms come through,
But it gives us some more challenges to work through and learn from so that's definitely an upside. Now I'm even more prepared for the next one :)
We were at one appointment on Monday and about halfway through the lesson it starts POURING. By the time the lesson ended (about 10 min later) the entire walkway was flooded. I'm not going to lie, I have been waiting for almost a year to be able to request what I requested that day... Leap Frog with the chairs. It was awesome. We grabbed two chairs and took turns getting to the door of the house! It was quite the experience :)
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| Sprinkling some wood-chippy stuff to absorb water. |
We had a successful finish to the Walk for Peace event and Zone Conference yesterday!
On Thursday, last week, we hosted the event at the Plaza.
It was great! I actually would like to give a personal thank you to Elder Giar for this one...
Yes! there was lots of audio/visual equipment...
No! There was nobody there that knew how it all fits together.
Thanks for teaching me, my brother :)
We successfully had projectors working and mics, pianos, and computers wired through the soundboard. It was really fun!
Yes, my pants and shoes are always wet. Always.
I actually wanted to mention a couple things that stood out to me at
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| I had help sprinkling wood-chippy stuff..... |
The first of which, I might discuss next week because I want to study more about it. The second ties into what I shared last week about being happy. Here they are-
1. "Instead of focusing so much on trying to live a 100% perfect life with no mistakes, I believe we need to focus more on learning how to repent PERFECTLY for our sins."
- President McCurdy
2. "There is nothing inside of me that wants to be disobedient to my Heavenly Father."
- Sister Dustin
I want to focus on this second quote by Sister Dustin - who, having reached the end of her mission, will be going home this transfer. Sister McCurdy shared an amazing workshop with us on Elder Holland's address given recently at BYU-Idaho. It was about what it means to be happy and how it is achieved.
I want to print this talk out and study a little more on the topic, but I want to share the three overall things that Elder Holland shared. We read in 2 Nephi 5:27 an interesting verse:
"And it came to pass that we lived after the manner of happiness."
We notice it doesn't say that the people of Nephi here lived happily, but rather they lived AFTER THE MANNER of happiness. I love this. We can unlock an amazing secret to happiness if we can emulate this strategy and live as they lived. But what is this "manner of happiness"? Elder Holland described it in three ways:
1. Living AND BEING OBEDIENT to the principles and ordinances of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in His true church.
- This is where Sister Dustin's testimony comes in. We need to get to a point in our life where there is literally nothing inside of us that wants to disobey our Father in Heaven. I think we would all like to say that this is how we feel - and it very well may be - but it can go deeper than that. We need to have the Natural Man inside all of us rooted out and replaced with the Spirit of the Lord. This is when we can truly start down the road to eternal happiness.
2. Understanding that true happiness is something that we need to CHOOSE, it will not just happen automatically.
- I mentioned this last week so I won't beat a dead horse here (sorry, thank my dad for the weird phrases I sometimes use. Still trying to fit in a "horse shoes and hand grenades" line somewhere... ;)..) It's up to us! So choose to be happy and have a good attitude!
- "Man is only as happy as he sets his mind to be." - Abe Lincoln
3. We need to be an industrious people.
- We need to be proactive! We need to DO things with our hands. We can't sit around and say, "someday I'll understand," or, "someday I'll be happy." We need to get started TODAY! Happiness is something that comes when we aren't focused on it, but rather on others. When we are focused on living the way that Christ taught, true happiness just comes.
Anyways, I know this is basically what we talked about last week, but I just thought that was so awesome that it was exactly what Sister McCurdy felt inspired to share with the mission yesterday. It's a life principle, so let's learn it. I love learning :)
I love you all so much!! Be happy! I know that so many of you are doing harder things than I am right now, but that is not at all an excuse to be unhappy. It's the purpose of our existence to do hard things and to learn. I know that as we start to understand the big picture of life, we understand that there is nothing we desire more than receiving a fullness of joy at the right hand of God.
Love you,
Elder Jacobs
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| Mmmmmm....delicious dried fish. |
