Best breakfast ever - Oatmeal, brown sugar, a kiwi, and applesauce. Amazing. Second best breakfast ever - Oatmeal, brown sugar, peaches, vanilla yogurt. So good! I love breakfast.
Ah man I have like 29 things to write today but I don't know if I'll have time!
Well... I love teaching about apostasy. Apostasy is great. The apostasy wasn't great, but teaching about it is. It makes so much sense. If you believe the Bible is true, then you have to believe in some kind of apostasy. There are so many scriptures about it! With enough time, we can pretty much spell it out and explain it completely logically for someone. Usually as a missionary, in a lesson we don't take that much time. So maybe its just for me, but apostasy is no joke. Half the New Testament is Paul writing letters to people telling them what they should be doing (because they're doing it wrong). Even when apostles were on the earth, even with authority, people couldn't quite get it right all the time (we see this today too of course, people aren't perfect). So one can only imagine what happened when the church was left to the people. Oh, that's why we have like 99 churches that all worship Christ but do it 101 different ways! I love it. Its perfect. So many scriptures to back it all up to. The best line ever is "prove it with the Bible!" Ha - I love it. Good one with the JWs. I like to throw it around in regular conversation - prove it with the Bible! I can prove apostasy with the Bible baby. Ha!
We did some service the other day for this old fella in the ward who takes us out to dinner pretty much every week. To real nice places, which is great because I get to try some of Hartfords good restaurants. Anyway, I pulled like a billion giant weeds out along this chain link fence and they were all growing up through all the holes and all. Kind of a nightmare, but I actually kinda enjoyed because we rarely do physical work much. It was nice to get dirty, ya know. So while I was clearing out all this plant garbage, I was thinking about it. I’d heard this analogy of roots and branches in reference to missionary work. People have concerns. Like, oh I have to quit smoking. I don’t want to do that. That’s a branch. The root is whether or not Joseph Smith was a prophet and whether he was really receiving revelation from God regarding the word of wisdom. If he was, then its God who wants you to quit smoking. If you cut the root, and give someone a testimony that Joseph Smith is a prophet, the branch dies too. Know what I’m saying?
I was thinking about this because I kept having to cut branches just to get to the stem, and then cut stems to get to the root while I was clearing this jungle of weeds. It was cool to be thinking about it as I pretty much experienced the analogy. Maybe sometimes we do have “branch” concerns with things. Maybe one can’t just cut the root to make the problem go away. Maybe you gotta clear some of the leaves and stuff away so you can actually see where the root is. I don’t know. Everything seems to go on a case-by-case basis out here. But if a problem is going to go away, ultimately, the root has to be pulled out. Awesome converts who change their lives and become wonderful latter day saints cleared out all their roots and started fresh. The ones who get offended by this and that after time or aren’t willing to do this and that and go less active, probably never got the roots out. You can clear all the visible stuff out and it will be pretty for a while. But eventually the weed will grow back! Might not be for a long time, but if we don’t resolve our concerns and get down to what the real problem is, stuff is eventually going to grow back and ruin the view. Unless you spray it every year. And maybe you can do that too. Maybe there are some things some of us just aren’t going to get over, but that we can live with as long as we “spray” it every year. Like read the scriptures and go to church and pray and stuff. Maybe. I’m just kinda typing as I think now so who knows. Fun analogy to get lost in thought about when you’re pulling weeds though.
I also experienced a miracle while pulling weeds! While having my face all up this nasty mess, I didn’t have an insane allergy disaster! I had a few Claritin with me and I’ve taken one the last few days to see if they’d actually work cause I’m getting allergies lately. They never worked at home it seemed, but out here they seem to actually make a legitimate difference. So that’s nice.
I saw this crazy lady forget to put her car back into drive the other day and go full speed over a curb and slam into the wall of a building. Didn’t surprise me much though. People are nuts around here.
I can’t believe were all split up! So wild to think about.
GENERAL CONFERENCE COMING UP!!!!! BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!!! Aah I can’t even wait.
I had a cool opportunity to share my story about deciding to go on a mission with an investigator last night and how it paralleled with her situation and how she needs to pray about being baptized. Hope she does it and gets an answer! Feeling the spirit is great. It is the best. There is nothing that feels so wonderful.
We were talking about the creation story and how it may or may not be literal, and probably isn’t. My companion put it well to this silly guy on the street the other day – if you were going to explain something like nuclear physics to an 8 year old, you probably wouldn’t just go right into it. You’d use something that they could understand to explain it. Like an analogy. And how that is probably what the creation story, Adam and Even and all, is. A way for us to understand something far too complex for us to understand. So that gets me thinking…supposing that is the case, what in the heck is the creation story helping us understand? What really happened? Gosh, being able to know all that kind of crazy stuff about existence and intelligence and all, that’s almost motivation enough to be exalted. To strive for it. So that we could know all the many mysteries of the universe. That will be sweet. What could Adam and Even and the Fall and all that be trying to teach as about? What happened to bring us all down here? I love getting lost in thought about stuff like that. I’ve been thinking so much lately. About so many things. I’ve been studying the Book of Mormon a lot closer than I ever have and I’m in 2 Nephi reading all the Isaiah stuff and that’s got me thinking. The creation story’s got me thinking. People got me thinking. Life’s got me thinking. I love it. Even though it makes me crazy sometimes. Makes my mind a mess sometimes.
Gotta go, love you all like crazy!
David
