Friday, January 20, 2017

Madagascar Update!

Dear Family,
This week was great. You might have heard by now of the earthquake over here in Madagascar, but everything is ok, no one got hurt. I am actually far away from it so we really didn't even feel it. Other than that things are good here. We have some great investigators that we are just working on getting married so that they can get baptized here coming up. 

This week was a big success for us. I actually spent a couple of days on splits, so I was outside of my area a little bit. I went with Elder Shoemaker and Elder Chounlamany, and it was a great couple of days. It is allways good to get back to my area when that is all done though. We have a bunch of super cool families who come to church every week but we are just working on getting them all married first. One of the things that we have been struggling with a little bit is finding cool new people. We tract a lot and always get in to find lessons and families and people let us in all of the time, but it has been difficult to find people who have been truly prepared for the gospel. We will keep working right along all the same and see where everything goes. One of my favorite people is Christian. He is around 23 years old and he just showed up to church one day with one of his good friends. He has been learning for a few weeks now and comes to church every week and is just a way cool guy. Things are going great.

So this week in my study on faith I moved on to Father Adam, and I looked in to how Heavenly Father helped him to develop faith. Adam is a pretty cool guy, I wish that we had a little bit of information about him. One the things that I notice comes from the Book of Moses (great book). Adam falls and is cast out of the garden. I read through it, and nowhere in the fall does it say anything about The Atonement or the Savior or anything like that. What I gathered was that when Adam fell, he thought he was done. He didn't know that he was going to be able to make it back. That must have been a pretty dreary time for him. Then, the
 Lord commands him to start making sacrifices. Adam doesn't really know why, he just does it anyways. Then an angel comes and says "Dude, why are you doing these sacrifices" (not a direct quote, I paraphrased that). Adam looks at him for a second and then answers him "Ya know, I don't really know" (also paraphrased). The angel then goes on to explain that it is symbolic of the Savior and His Great and Atoning Sacrifice. This is the way that Heavenly Father teaches all of us. He gives us hands on experiences so that when the explanation finally comes it is much more clear to us. The angel could have just come down in a pillar of light and told Adam that there would be an Atonement, and Adam might have understood it, but it took on a whole new meaning to him because he had experienced it himself. In Matthew 5:48 we are commanded to be perfect like our Father in Heaven. More than anyone else, He knows what we need to do and to learn in order for us to become perfect like him, and he guides us in our lives to places and people that will teach us these things. Sometimes this is a hard way to learn. That is where faith comes in. Faith is trusting that, as D&C 1 says, all of these things will be for our benifit, and having the humility to allow The Lord to change us each in to what he needs us to be. I know he has a plan for each of us. Love you all so much,

Elder Jensen

Scripture of the week: Moses 5:6-10

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