This week has become a big lesson for me on the Straight and Narrow Path and i learned it in two ways. We started off the week with lots of success. We marked baptismal days monday tuesday wednesday and thursday and were hoping for everyone to go to church and prepare. Then disaster struck and we watched the difficulty of the message and the stubbornness of people´s hearts eat away at their initial desires. It was so sad to watch but at least a ray of sunlight shone through darkness. A young couple that is preparing to get married but has decided to not live together.
After watching a miraculously spiritual experience with a man, who was looking for a purpose in life and was crying during the story of the restoration, slowly loose its importance and value. then a woman who obviously felt touched during the message and said that she wouldn't pray because if she prayed she would receive and response and she would have to follow it and she doesn't want to and finally an investigator loose interest because a big sign didn't come to convince him right off the bat. after all this i was feeling kinda down.
but then we taught a young couple with such an inner desire to follow the Truth is following new commandments without complaints and earnestly trying to turn into members of the church. I was impressed to see that a majority of converts convert them-selves. no amount of pushing from missionaries or friends converts them. conversion is between God, the Spirit, and the person. We are just instruments to help the process.
I read in Mark this week how in the miracle of the sleeping girl, when Christ entered and said that she was sleeping everybody laughed and mocked him. Then he shew them out and performed the miracle. If someone doesn't even have the faith to believe in miracles why would that be deserving of one. it is a tough principle but it is the truth, faith come before miracles. if we want to be more deeply converted we have to have faith in conversion and want to be converted.
We also had some great experiences this week. We went to subway and i enjoyed my first fresh cookie in a long time. We also went to an english course to help the students and ended up teaching about the Book of Mormon and why we are on the mission. In this class we found a married man that wants to hear more about us and the message. he even invited us to a ju-jit-zu class. haha imagine, military man against two missionaries.
I hope that you all enjoy the holiday and rest a lot. I think our entire house is going to play risk together today. what fun. hopefully it doesn't start a fight. Until next week. Love you all. Please take this precious time in your life to think about the Christ´s Sacrifice and remind yourselves about why we are here on the earth.
Love you all tons
Elder Jacobson (Andrew)
No comments:
Post a Comment