7-26
Wooowww. Ok, a week ago we helped some guy clean out an awful storage unit. A few years ago he had to go to the hospital and some friends and realtors threw everything in his house into this storage unit. Now it as time for him to get the stuff out. He had nobody else to help him so he called the church and asked for missionaries.
Everybody, if you're gonna do anything, especially pack a storage unit- do it right please. It is not worth the frustration and pain to have to deal with poorly packed boxes and disarray in every inch of stuff. Please do it the right way.
Anyways, eventually we finished up and we got to the car. I'm ready to deliver a hilarious line about how awful that service was when my companion looks up and says "Elder. . . There's a nail in my leg" sure enough there literally is a nail sticking out of his flesh.
All-day-long-story short: we sat in 3 different urgent care/ emergency rooms for a while and finally actually got in at the "realest" ER we could find and after 3 hours some doctor “321”ed it and yanked it out. Man it was a lot bigger than we thought. Elder Searle got a tetanus shot and we headed out to go use our final hour of PDay.
Then Zone Conference the following day- wow. That was the most powerful zone Conference I've ever been to. Why? The absolutely pure testimonies given. President Larsen bore pure testimony of Jesus Christ and the Atonement for an hour. The spirit was undeniably strong, most of us felt it in our eyes lol. It is in my top 10 deepest desires to have a testimony so sure and so powerfully rooted that, if provided, I could stun a crowd like how President Larsen did. All I'd need to say is " I know Jesus Christ lives" and the spirit would zap their hearts and then they'd know the church is true too.
I also found a package for me at Zone Conference.
Wow mom, I'm afraid you have overdone it with the whole "hump day" thing. TBH with you all I actually had no clue what “Hump-Day” meant. I had to go to the family history center and look it up. Anyways now I get it. Thank you all so much for helping my mom make that wonderfully cute book. You're all so wonderful. And I promise to keep delivering quality letters but you have to promise that instead of telling my parents how good the Emails are you need to tell me instead lol.
Ok. Then we had interviews. Wow. I have permission to do Hindi. The Hindi program will be started. I just have to train the new ASL elders first. We also had a powerful talk about repentance and guess who was taking notes. . . .President Larsen.
"I've never considered that before" and " I've never thought about it like that" and "I love that so much" were phrases I heard…a few times.
What an incredible topic repentance is.
Then we went to a member's home for dinner and he walked us out to a playground he had built for his kids and taught us about "compression" and "tensile." Wow.
Specifically in regard to gate supports. This will be a challenge to explain over email. But I will try.
When you make a gate, it has support on one side, the other side is hanging. The side opposite the support wants to fall down. Imagine a “X” across the gate. If the side opposite the side that is connected to the fence were to hang down, one diagonal gets longer, while the other diagonal gets shorter. Think about the shape the rectangle gate wants to become. It's like a more diamond shape with 2 obtuse angles and 2 acute angles. Do you see it? 1 diagonal gets longer while the other gets shorter- if the gate were allowed to submit to the gravity.
To combat this Gate-builders must either choose to use Tensile strength or Compressive strength. They can focus on either preventing one diagonal from gaining length; or they can focus on preventing the other diagonal from getting shorter. The solutions are different but both are actually used fairly commonly. Say you think compression is cooler, you would screw a wooden board to the gate that lines up with the diagonal that would get shorter- now it cant get shorter because the compression strength in the board is holding all the force. Ok, now tensile. You take a metal cord and attach it to the diagonal that is trying to get longer- now it can't because the cord is holding up all the force.
Every time I think about this I am amazed. There is so much to learn from this principle. For example, sometimes you'll see a cord or a board attached to the gate incorrectly- on the wrong diagonal. When this happens is actually doing next to nothing to support the gate. It has to be on the right diagonal in order to do us any good. Kinda like THE GOSPEL. If you attach principles to your life incorrectly they will not help you. If you keep commandments but your heart’s not in the right place or it's done grudgingly you simply don't receive the blessings and support that you could if you would just put it all on the right diagonal(D&C 58:29). If you're going to church but it's not for the right reasons you're missing out on so much.
The really beautiful and instructive piece of this idea is that proper alignment of the support actually lifts the fence up. It literally gives it support. . .a lot like the atonement of Jesus Christ. If you were to put the board or cord on the gate wrong then it takes a lot of work to take it all out and then put it on the right way- however, it is possible. We can do the same thing- that process is Repentance through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
Amazing right? God wrote the laws of physics in a way that teaches us about his Son’s sacrifice.
Well, the next day we went park and contacting we met a wonderful Indian woman named Ann. She said her husband actually went to BYU! She was amazed at the respect and diligence we have for serving God. I shared the first vision with her in Hindi and watched as every word struck her soul. She was completely amazed to hear Hindi from a white person and also amazed at the spirit that was there as we stood by the park. I told her to come to church and learn more and to bring her husband with her. She said she would!
I also had the opportunity to go on exchange with Elder Evenson, a wonderful Zone Leader. We stayed up till around 1:00 talking about repentance and it was powerful. We were in an area where a recent ASL convert lives and I was like- we should just visit her (understand, this is Tina Jones- she told us to never come back a week after her baptism and we have not been over since January) we went over and Tina looked kinda sad. Real quickly I started asking her questions like “Do you remember the spirit you felt? Do you not remember the feelings you had as we read from the Book of Mormon? Do you remember the love you felt at church? Do you remember the light from when you were baptized?” she said she did remember. She just stopped everything because her family told her “Mormons religion is not true” Tina gave us the names and facebooks of all these family members and asked us to teach them. Oh boy. We will try. Also a spanish doordash guy came over and elder Evenson translated to english which i translated to ASL and then back through. There was some mess up with the order and this guy was pretty upset. But it was a pretty funny experience lol.
Well, that's enough for now, I love you all so much. Remember to make sure your alignment is right so that you can be lifted and supported by the gospel. (and if you thought this was good dont tell my mom, tell me lol)
No comments:
Post a Comment