Chapter 32: Happy Mothers Day, It takes faith!

 Wed May 15, 2024

Hey everyone, happy mothers day!  Not much to update y'all on this week.  We had a lot of lessons with some of our friends, we're going to ask our most progressing friend to be baptized next time we meet.  Our events nights are starting to grow a lot more with tons of New people coming in each week!  Also one of our friends is teaching us Arabic so that's awesome!  Finnish is starting to grow a lot,  I can hold really good conversions on the street by myself.   Overall life is great, we found an absolutely massive student housing area that we can tract which is awesome.  On P day we and the district went to the ocean again and played some volleyball and ate lunch, it was a good time!  

Here's a post I made a while back, but I feel like sharing it here too

Alma 32:21
"And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true."

 I really like this verse at it flat out tells us what faith is, it is believing in something that we cannot physically see that is real. An example of this that I can think of is the oxygen that we breath in everyday. We can't see the tiny molecules and atoms flying around us in our day to day life, but that doesn't change the fact that they are there and are keeping us physically alive, likewise having faith keeps us spiritually alive, we may not see God but everywhere we look is the evidence that he exists. Having faith doesn't mean that we will have all of the answers to our questions, it's putting our trust in our loving Heavenly Father and believing in his words, and believing that he can help us. So what is the power of faith, and why is it so important? In my life I've seen that faith pulls through when we are having the hardest of times, even when things seem awful and the world is against us, as long as we hold onto our faith in God and trust in him, and have faith that he loves us, we can make it through those dark times. Having faith doesn't mean that bad things won't happen to you, and it doesn't mean things will turn out the way you want it to, but it does give you the strength to endure the hard times. When things get hard turning to God is the best solution because you can ALWAYS find comfort with The Creator, and as you turn to him your faith will grow and blessings will eventually come. Before my mission I used to listen to a lot of talks and speeches from all sorts of people, but my favorite speech was from a man named Eric Thomas, he spoke about Diamonds and how they're made. He basically said that everyone wants diamonds because of how beautiful they are, and that is why they are so valuable, but for a diamond to become a diamond it has to go through intense heat and pressure, he likened this to how to become the best versions of ourselves we also have to go through this intense heat and pressure. I'd like to change this metaphor up a bit into a more spiritual related message. In this scenario God is our creator and he wants each of us to become the most beautiful diamonds that he knows we can all become. The only thing standing in our way from becoming Diamonds is the trials of our lives, or in the context of this story the heat and pressure that our Creator knows we have to go through. The Creator will allow us to go through this heat and pressure because he knows the end goal, he knows what we are all capable of becoming perfectly, and to a degree we also know what we can become, or at the least, we know that we can become better than what we are. However some of us may say to the creator that the heat and the pressure is too much to take, and in the end we walk away and quit, and our creator mourns because he knew what we were capable of becoming, but we didn't have enough faith in our Creator, we didn't have the faith necessary to surrender ourselves to the creator and say " I know it will be hard, but through it all I know that my creator has a plan for me, and as I follow his will and cling onto him with faith, I can overcome the heat and pressure and challenges of this world". Having faith changes everything in this world, when we turn to God in times of struggle we can find peace. As we continue to trust in him through all the heat and pressure of this world, as we continue to trust in our great Creator, we can all become diamonds, and how joyful will we be when we celebrate with our Creator at our newfound transformation. To whoever out there may be going through difficult times I plead with you to not give up, to hold on no matter what, the storm will pass, the heat will cool, the pressure will ease off, just have the faith in our Creator now to endure it.

Everyone take care and have a great week, sorry my emails have been sucking lately, I'll start making them better, I'm just always busy. lol







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