BUENOS DIAS ALL YALL!!!!
So I will be staying in the BR for another transfer but Elder Tuttle is getting transfer. Estoy muy Triste...... I am pretty sure I know who is my new companion and he is one of my really good friends in the mission so I am really excited.
This week was really awesome and was full of miracles. We continued to do some tracting in a neighborhood. We found a couple of people who we shared the message of the restoration to. One was a man named Irberto when after we shared the restoration. After he asked if we could share a prayer with him. We later scheduled a return appointment with him.
We did an awesome service project at the Mall of Louisiana with an angel tree project. It was really fun. We will be doing service again this friday... black friday..... HAHA! That will be fun!!!!!
We had a really amazing experience sunday night. We had a follow up appointment with a guy we contacted and taught the restoration lesson named Hector. We went to his place and he had invited his whole family and a bunch of neighbors to here the message of the restoration. There were 10 people in that lesson listening to us about the restoration. It was a very powerful moment. During the lesson we had a prompting to ask them who is Jesus Christ to them and they all gave powerful answers. They all loved the message of the restoration and accepted a return appointment for the Book of Mormon. After Hector asked his wife to give the closing prayer and the spirit was really strong while giving the prayer. It was one of the most amazing moments of the mission.
So yall can probably guess what the spiritual thought is on.... GRATITUDE!!!! President Monson gave an amazing talk called the Divine Gift of Gratitude. In it he gave a quote by President Joseph F. Smith “The grateful man sees so much in the world to be thankful for, and with him the good outweighs the evil. Love over powers jealousy, and light drives darkness out of his life.” He continued: “Pride destroys our gratitude and sets up selfishness in its place. How much happier we are in the presence of a grateful and loving soul, and how careful we should be to cultivate, through the medium of a prayerful life, a thankful attitude toward God and man!"
Continuing President Monson said, Do material possessions make us happy and grateful?Perhaps momentarily. However, those things which provide deep and lasting happiness and gratitude are the things which money cannot buy: our families, the gospel, good friends, our health, our abilities, the love we receive from those around us. Unfortunately, these are some of the things we allow ourselves to take for granted.
I share with you an account of one family which was able to find blessings in the midst of serious challenges.This is an account I read many years ago and have kept because of the message it conveys. It was written by Gordon Green and appeared in an American magazine over 50 years ago.
Gordon tells how he grew up on a farm in Canada,where he and his siblings had to hurry home from school while the other children played ball and went swimming. Their father, however, had the capacity to help them understand that their work amounted to something. This was especially true after harvest time when the family celebrated Thanksgiving, for on that day their father gave them a great gift. He took an inventory of everything they had.
On Thanksgiving morning he would take them to the cellar with its barrels of apples, bins of beets, carrots packed in sand, and mountains of sacked potatoes as well as peas, corn, string beans, jellies, strawberries,and other preserves which filled their shelves. He had the children count everything carefully. Then they went out to the barn and figured how many tons of hay there were and how many bushels of grain in the granary.They counted the cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and geese. Their father said he wanted to see how they stood, but they knew he really wanted them to realize on that feast day how richly God had blessed them and had smiled upon all their hours of work. Finally, when they sat down to the feast their mother had prepared,the blessings were something they felt.
Gordon indicated, however, that the Thanksgiving he remembered most thankfully was the year they seemed to have nothing for which to be grateful.
The year started off well: they had leftover hay, lots of seed, four litters of pigs, and their father had a little money set aside so that someday he could afford to buy a hay loader—a wonderful machine most farmers just dreamed of owning. It was also the year that electricity came to their town—although not to them because they couldn’t afford it.
One night when Gordon’s mother was doing her big wash, his father stepped in and took his turn over the washboard and asked his wife to rest and do her knitting. He said, “You spend more time doing the wash than sleeping. Do you think we should break down and get electricity?” Although elated at the prospect, she shed a tear or two as she thought of the hay loader that wouldn’t be bought.
So the electrical line went up their lane that year.Although it was nothing fancy, they acquired a washing machine that worked all day by itself and brilliant lightbulbs that dangled from each ceiling. There were no more lamps to fill with oil, no more wicks to cut, no more sooty chimneys to wash. The lamps went
