Is Your Love Strong Enough?

I have been coughing and stuff for about 8 months and it's stupid. There's been various points of my mission where I've said, "That's enough, we're getting help." This was like the fourth time. We went down to an urgent care and they said I may have a hernia which is causing all my reflux. They gave me a prescription and asked a beautiful question, "Where would you like to pick them up?" We have a Costco next to us that we pass every day, but we are without a membership. I was recently told that they have to let you in by law if you are picking up a prescription. For the first time in almost 8 months, I roamed the beautiful store. I couldn't help but smile as I passed through the beautiful aisles and breathed the family scents of the best store I know of. Free samples were left and right and one lady gave us way more than usual because she knows we are working hard. It was nothing short of glorious. Anyways, I then got to go to the hospital on Friday to drink way too much barium and then get x-rayed. I do not have a hernia and my eternal cough is still a mystery. Here's to hoping the pills I'm on work. 

I got to eat another new food for the first time this week. Corn on the cob! It's kind of hard to eat, but it's not that bad! It was cool to eat a new food... ;) I also bought a coconut last week that I wanted to eat. It was quite a process. It took the efforts of an African war hammer to smite it open. It was even harder trying to eat the inside. Conclusion: I wont be buying another coconut.

We got invited to a born again Christian worship session one evening. It was awesome, we sang a bunch of songs I mostly knew together, and then we discussed our beliefs. Funny we were teaching about the Book of Mormon considering we then became Alma and Amulek. They asked many questions in attempts to pull us from our faith. Some were very advanced and so I was glad that neither of us were new missionaries. They were never able to confound us, though we confounded them. I then felt the spirit strongly and taught all about Christ's grace for like five minutes. I was teaching some things that only could have come from the spirit itself. It ended up putting one girl in tears, and she said, "but how can you know any of this? You don't have proof." And we let her know that God already confirmed the truth to her, and His spirit was the reason everyone in the room fell silent. It was pretty awesome. We left a Book of Mormon and plan of salvation pamphlet behind and returned back home.

Another day we encountered born again Christians yet again. (No!!) They gladly invited us in and were far more aggressive. There was no getting through to them because of their constant interruptions and the cunning ways of man. One man eventually got so angry that we couldn't be shaken that he raised his arm to the square and prayed to Jesus for us to be struck with the truth. I told him that we had a great time and that we now had to go. 

One of the most important parts of missionary work is setting goals. A goal shows God what we hope to accomplish, and if we are willing to put in the work, He will usually help us succeed. We worked hard this week but it was a bit tough. We have 5 people on date to be baptized and we had a goal to have 7. We didn't have any lessons set up, and then Sunday afternoon, an investigator family called. They really wanted us to come over, answer questions, and teach a short discussion. It was great to be invited instead of tract, so we headed on over. At the end of the lesson, we invited them to be baptized on June 9th. They said that that was too far away, and now their baptism date is may 26th. I was so surprised, I kind of just sat in shock for 10 seconds while the family rejoiced and talked about plans for it. There you have it, the Lord will provide.

So anyways, I had a dream a short while ago. I believe that God was teaching me in the form of a parable. In the dream, I was getting off a zip line which got off on a big tower. My phone was playing music. God was at the end and he helped me get off the line and onto the tower. I wanted to show respect, so I pulled out my phone to pause the music and accidentally dropped it down the tower. He told me to wait for him and then we could go get it together. He then teleported away. I looked down and saw that I could easily climb down to go see the status of the phone. I climbed down to grab it and found that it was completely destroyed. I pocketed it and climbed back up as God reappeared. He asked me why I didn't wait for him. I responded, "I guess my curiosity for my phone was greater than my love for you. I'm sorry." And he looked at me in disappointment. That's the whole dream. It had been on my mind for quite some time. It certainly wasn't true. I went almost 5 months without a phone and I was perfectly ok. I kept analyzing the dream and eventually learned that it wasn't a story about a phone. It was about love. It was in that moment when I realized something that changed me. Following rules can sometimes be difficult. However, we know the rules come from Him. One way we can show our love is by listening and following the rules. This is the subject of my email. "Is your love strong enough?" For example, is my love for God strong enough to avoid the temptation of this or that? I think that if we keep this in mind, it will be far easier to follow Him and His son. 

That's it for this week. It was a tough one but it yielded some great results .

X-ray Day

Coconut!

Finally a haircut