I do miss that ukulele

So this week hasn't been anything especially incredible that I can particularly remember right now. We are just HURTING for people to teach! We are diligent. We are trying all the things we know of. Seems so many things are just way more long term scope. So I guess it takes patience, as most good things in life do take. Its just frustrating when as a missionary you are supposed to be a teaching resource, and you aren't teaching! We taught 7 lessons this past week. 6 of them were to members. Celia Streit sent me a few posts from her nephew or someones missionary blog down in the Domoinican Republic a few months back. It was really cool to read, but this guy was teaching like 30 lessons a week or something! All to investigators! Its crazy how different the experience of a mission is depending where in the world you go. Yet I'm sure its very similar at the same time. It'd be interesting to talk about the struggles in different places. I suppose retention would be a lot more difficult in places where your baptizing a ton of poeple. Its hard here. Members HAVE to reach out to the new converts or they will slide away quickly.

So yes, pretty regular week. But boy is the work a lot easier when you are with someone who is fun and I'm not constantly stressing out about carrying 90% of the work load and responsibility. Stress and emotional difficulties make a person tired. I really have more energy since Elder Mansfield left. Its interesting how that works. It is such a blessing to be sharing the workload again. To be with an experienced missionary.

Like I said, the work is kinda rough right now. Its stale. I feel like our teaching pool has become a puddle of muddly water. And every day we seek out fresh pure clean beautiful pure water but we can't find it!! Ha. We'll find it.

The war chapters in Alma are super super sweet, just for the record. Super super sweet. A joy to read.

Okay I have to put a plug in for the basic simple principles of the gospel. It seems some people are a little put off by having to study the gospel principles manual. Like its too simple or something. Like they know all these things already. Well obviously we wouldn't be told by the Lords trusted servants to do it if there wasn't a reason for it. Perhaps we are loosing sight of the basics. I just hope that we won't be too prideful and think that we already know about faith and repentence so much that we don't need to learn about it in church. Every day we have opportunities to exercise our faith. Its by doing things we don't want to do that are right. By stepping out of our comfort zone, by helping someone in need that we might not want to help. We show our faith by believing that the Lord will bless us for these things, if for no other reason, at least because they are right and pleasing to our Heavenly Father, and we are doing them (hopefully). But when we mess up we must repent. We must change our behaviors to be in line with Gods commnandments. Doing this also takes faith. It takes faith to give up the things that might keep us from growing close to God. Or whatever the sin might be. So everyday we should be repenting. Then we go to church and renew ourselves each week. We renew our covenants we made at baptism, and are cleansed by Christ's Atonment, and made worthy to have the Holy Ghost with us more abundantely. Then we kinda start over. We do it for our whole lives, becoming a little better and a little better each week. I feel like we often loose sight of this great process. People forget about how seriously these priniciples apply every hour of the day in our lives because they want to find out where Kolob is. Or they're just taken away by the many distractions of the world or whatever the case may be. I hope we will all take pleasure in studying the basics of our wonderful faith and remembering how great simplicity is. How can you apply these principles in your life today? Surely there are many many ways. Okay, I think I'm done with that.

Moving on, there is this lady in our ward, Sister Lopez. You cannot imagine this ladies situation in life right now. I could never do justice trying to explain it. I feel so terrible for her and wish that she could just have 5 minutes of perfect peace in her life right now. Count your blessings everyone. Count them. Each and every one. If you can stand to live in the house you live in even a little bit, if its not in a nieghborhood full of crime and sin, count your blessings. If you have children who make even slightly sensible choices, count your blessings. If you care for your grandkids and they give you even the slightest, slightest bit of respect, count your blessings. If you don't have to constantly worry about your family being taken away from you because of something completely out of your control (like other people's extremely poor use of agency), count your blessings. Count them one by one, because I am pretty much positive that every one within the scope of these emails I write has much to be grateful for. My heart goes out to this dear Sister and her insane challenges. I can't believe what people have to endure in this life sometimes. I guess sometimes the Lord sees fit to try his people. I don't know. We all have our own Gethsemene's I suppose. Its truly a refiners fire here sometimes. The world can really be an awful place sometimes. And its so sad to see people in these situations because of other people's bad choices. Sister Lopez is in this situation because she wanted to help her family. And now its all kinda blown up all over the place becasuse one of her daughters is terribly irresponsible. I hate seeing it.

Well i guess I pretty much gotta run, the computers gonna kick me off in a few minutes. Laura I'm sending you a letter, will you get it befor you come home?? When do you come home? Home. What a thing. I love you all so much and can't even comprehend how fortunate we are. Please all of you make smart choices and think things through and seek the Lords help before you start using heroin and having a bunch of crazy children! Sound good? Okay cool. You're all the best! I Love our Family!

Love David!