May 26, 2014

This past week was pretty good, though not particularly extraordinary. We ended up being able to teach some 16 lessons to less active members, and each one was more awesome than the last. I ended up spending a lot of time studying the Plan of Salvation, and that was pretty much all we seemed to teach this week. I never thought about how powerful that could be. It seems as though a lot of the time we get hung up on telling them how good the Book of Mormon is, and how the Gospel has been restored, when really I reckon we ought to be focusing on the Plan just a wee bit more. I've found that I really enjoy the question "If you knew, for a fact, that you have a Father in Heaven who loves you, and wants you to come back, would you do everything that you could to get back to him?" Who's going to answer no to that? If they do, I reckon that's a situation in which we no longer need be involved. I love that. Helping people come to the realization that we have a Father, who is powerful above all, that could be doing so many other things, but instead is concerned about our salvation. It's proved to be quite a powerful way of teaching, and it's always such a sweet experience to see the realization and comprehension in their eyes. So incredible.

The other thing that I've been contemplating this week comes from my studies in Jesus the Christ. I left a commitment a couple weeks back to the zone to read Jesus the Christ, and after doing so realized that I hadn't read it in about a year. When I first came out, I read it three times through in about as many months, and then seemed to just set it aside, assuming that it had nothing left to teach me. Or maybe I was just too lazy to crack it open, either way, it hasn't been read in just under a year. So, I started reading again, and I started to remember some of the things that I discovered early on last year. One of which was the fact that we all have the capability of becoming as God, and the only thing that stops us is sin. Early on, it talks about the few sentences that we have pertaining to Christ's childhood and teenage years. It mentions that he grew from grace to grace, but that he still had to grow. He didn't just start out as the person that he was once he started ministering in the New Testament, he had to become that person. I thought of Nephi (one of the later ones) and a scripture that says he was ministered unto by angels daily. How awesome would that be. It all comes down to how clean we are willing to be, really. How much we are willing to do and how much we are willing to resist. If we could but work out the dark from our lives, then all there would be is light. Obviously none of us are perfect, and so we'll never be able to be as Christ was in this life, but we can sure try, and really the only thing stopping us is ourselves.

Aside from that, I don't have a whole lot else interesting to say. I hope everything is going sweet back home.
 Love Ya!