Hello everyone! Pura Vida!
I hope everyone had a great week and an even better general conference weekend!
I LOVE general conference, it's so awesome. Even though I'd still honestly rather listen to it in English, it's still good in Spanish, I guess haha. But for those who aren't familiar with general conference, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have a worldwide "general" conference every 6 months where we have the privilege of hearing inspired, spiritual messages from the prophet, the twelve apostles, and other leaders of the church. Cool right?? Who wouldn't want to listen? Unfortunately, lots of people haha... We only had 25 people at church with us on Sunday, and my companion and I brought 15 of those 25 people with us haha.
But guess who those 15 people were? The two inactive families that we're helping to reactivate!! The Esquivel family came for the second week in a row, and the Iraheta family finally came as well! It was awesome! I can't remember if I've talked much about the Iraheta family much but they're super great as well. There are 6 of them in the family, but we also found out that David, the dad, has an inactive sister that lives in our area as well. Her son came with the Iraheta family to church on Sunday as well and now has a baptismal date for the 14th of October!! If everything goes well, and I hope and pray that it does, we should have 5 baptisms in the next 2 weeks!!! 3 from the Iraheta family, 1 from the Esquivel family, and 1 from the family of Ricardo (our first baptism that we had here in Naranjo). It'll be a miracle if it all comes together in the end, but God is a God of miracles :)
From this general conference, there were several talks that I liked. But, I wouldn't say there was one, particular talk that stood out to me from the rest. What did stand out to me though was a topic/theme that I felt like was mentioned in a grand part of the messages given. I think President Uchtdorf put it best in his talk Saturday morning. We are here on the earth, preparing ourselves, to return to our "Heavenly Home". Our time here on Earth is only temporary, our real home is up in heaven with our Heavenly Father and His son Jesus Christ. Now, how is it that we return to this "Heavenly Home"? There are many things that we could say to answer this question, but to sum it up from the responses of the apostles and other leaders who spoke: have faith unto repentance, keep the commandments, and follow the "light" and example of our savior, Jesus Christ. We're not perfect, God knows that. We'll mess up from time to time. But that's okay. Thanks to Jesus Christ, we don't have to suffer in our sins forever. When WE, ourselves make the decision to repent and truly come unto Christ, this is when we experience true joy, happiness, and a remission of our sins and imperfections. He simply asks us to follow and TRUST in Him. He has prepared the way, but it depends on us to take to initiative to follow it. It's not the easiest route to take, but it's the route that leads us to eternal life.
Hope everyone has a great week this week!
Elder Smith
Pics: a part of our area called San Rafael, my comp during "exercise" in the morning hahaI hope everyone had a great week and an even better general conference weekend!
I LOVE general conference, it's so awesome. Even though I'd still honestly rather listen to it in English, it's still good in Spanish, I guess haha. But for those who aren't familiar with general conference, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have a worldwide "general" conference every 6 months where we have the privilege of hearing inspired, spiritual messages from the prophet, the twelve apostles, and other leaders of the church. Cool right?? Who wouldn't want to listen? Unfortunately, lots of people haha... We only had 25 people at church with us on Sunday, and my companion and I brought 15 of those 25 people with us haha.
But guess who those 15 people were? The two inactive families that we're helping to reactivate!! The Esquivel family came for the second week in a row, and the Iraheta family finally came as well! It was awesome! I can't remember if I've talked much about the Iraheta family much but they're super great as well. There are 6 of them in the family, but we also found out that David, the dad, has an inactive sister that lives in our area as well. Her son came with the Iraheta family to church on Sunday as well and now has a baptismal date for the 14th of October!! If everything goes well, and I hope and pray that it does, we should have 5 baptisms in the next 2 weeks!!! 3 from the Iraheta family, 1 from the Esquivel family, and 1 from the family of Ricardo (our first baptism that we had here in Naranjo). It'll be a miracle if it all comes together in the end, but God is a God of miracles :)
From this general conference, there were several talks that I liked. But, I wouldn't say there was one, particular talk that stood out to me from the rest. What did stand out to me though was a topic/theme that I felt like was mentioned in a grand part of the messages given. I think President Uchtdorf put it best in his talk Saturday morning. We are here on the earth, preparing ourselves, to return to our "Heavenly Home". Our time here on Earth is only temporary, our real home is up in heaven with our Heavenly Father and His son Jesus Christ. Now, how is it that we return to this "Heavenly Home"? There are many things that we could say to answer this question, but to sum it up from the responses of the apostles and other leaders who spoke: have faith unto repentance, keep the commandments, and follow the "light" and example of our savior, Jesus Christ. We're not perfect, God knows that. We'll mess up from time to time. But that's okay. Thanks to Jesus Christ, we don't have to suffer in our sins forever. When WE, ourselves make the decision to repent and truly come unto Christ, this is when we experience true joy, happiness, and a remission of our sins and imperfections. He simply asks us to follow and TRUST in Him. He has prepared the way, but it depends on us to take to initiative to follow it. It's not the easiest route to take, but it's the route that leads us to eternal life.
Hope everyone has a great week this week!
Elder Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment