Sept 22, 2013

hello family and friends!

i'm so grateful for your love and support! it's been great to hear from a lot of you. My heart is full this pday.. i love you guys and i hope you're all doing so well! so my momma wants me to just do away with the questions for a while. hopefully i'll be able to cover the bases i want too without the questions.. it's going to take some effort on my part i guess.. :P so here's for my week!

last pday was lame! we played basketball for a little bit then we sat at the apartment all day. we played millionaire monopoly and ate way too much candy. the good news is that i got all the missionaries that were playing monopoly to help me finish off my junk food. thank goodness.. pants are fittin' tight these days. we had dinner with the benecke family that day.. sister B is awesome. She loves organic stuff and always makes really healthy, really tasty meals. way good!

In district meeting this week we talked about obedience. like.. why beat this dead horse? oh wait.. it's not a dead horse. obedience is so important! our recitation for this month is the scripture in the D and C that states (i should know the reference.. dangit. ) there is a law irrevocobly decreed in the heavens before the foundations of the world.. upon which all blessings are predicated. when any man receive a blessing it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated... clearly i don't have it memorized. but it was a great reminder of the importance of obeying even the little things. we all need lots of blessings! like who couldn't use a little more blessings in their life? think about where you are at with obedience and maybe find something you can work on.. that's what our DL challenged us to do and as we strive for obedience we should watch for the Lord's hand in our lives! he will bless us for it.. there's a law in heaven about it so.. he's gonna do it. :)

we weren't super busy this week.. we had a lot of weird weather.. rain and wind. and it's been kinda chilly! i got to break my cardigan out :) i love that! but it was kind of restricting for us on our bikes. if we show up on somebody's porch soaking wet why on earth would they let us in to ruin their furniture? we did a lot of studying and preparing for appointments that we had set for the days. we had a lesson with Shane again this week.. he's doing awesome. we're having a hard time getting him to read the BoM but he's super busy and his GF isn't nearly as into it as he is. he lives in another ward.. i think i said that already but i'm sick of it! we have had so many people we've been teaching that haven't been in our ward boundaries. i tried to explain the situation to shane but he didn't want to deal with other missionaries or whatever. we are going to move some more wood for him this friday. oh yeah! he had us move some wood for him last friday. that was one thing that we did that was different. we went to a town called silver springs kinda by his house .. i dare someone to look at silver springs on google earth. literally the middle of the desert! we were stackin this wood with the wind blowing like crazy... my eyes within one second would get caked in sand! like i would blink and it was almost like a wind shield wiper moving it all to my eyelid. so fun.  haha. anyway the reason i brought that up is becuase we are going to help him get the rest of his wood on friday and we are going to involve the missionaries from his ward as well. oh we had another service project too.. this woman named shirley has been investigating the church for a while but hadn't had the missionary discussions.. we have taught her all the discussions and she lives with a member but there are some things that will need to occur of course before she can get baptized.. anyway she teaches kindergarten so on friday she asked for some help in her classroom. she didn't have any kids that day and she needed help hanging things from the ceiling and cleaning the fish tank and stuff. so that was fun! gosh rambling on for days.. anyway!    so the work has been slowing down a little with the change in everybody's schedule going back to school and work etc. loving it though!

yesterday in sacrament meeting a young man gave his farewell talk. it was pretty cool.. he is a theatre kid so he's super good at entertaining people .. he talked about all these experiences in his life that could have been the end of him.. but that the Lord has blessed him and kept him around through some crazy things, maybe so he can help some people via serving a mission. he'll be a great missionary! he's going to denver south, speaking spanish and he's going the mexico mtc. what i wanted to bring up is that his dad also spoke. his dad is a real soft spoken guy but very intelligent and pretty personable when you get him talking. he spoke on the talk by brad wilcox that is in the ensign for this month.. his grace is sufficient. i hope everyone that has a copy of the ensign took the time to read that one.. it's awesome! sometimes we get too wrapped up in our "works" and don't focus enough on what the savior did for us. "we don't earn heaven...we learn heaven" we are here on earth to learn the things needful of us to feel comfortable in the presence of God. many people think that obedience is a way of controlling us or it's a way for us to earn our way back.. the Atonement is a gift. the analogy Wilcox gives in the talk is a lot better than anything i can come up with but wow! it really puts it into perspective that our savior loves us.. and it is IN and THROUGH the atonement that we are able to return to live with Him... not by how good of people we are. just something to chew on. I loved it.

well this is a long email and kind of just about nothing. the last thing i'll include this week is an insight i came across in a book called "our living gospel" by Wendell Rich. the book was in the free stack at our church's library.. it's the 1966 aaronic priesthood study manual. so legit! but here's what caught my attention concerning faith.

"Faith is forward looking. the face of faith is turned toward the future. in fact, faith reaches from the past, through the present and into the future. here faith transcends knowledge because knowledge necessarily centers in the experiences and observations of the past. knowledge is backward looking, while faith is forward looking. through faith, the truths and experiences of the past become the foundation of the goal and the objectives of the future. knowledge brings the past into the present. faith, active in the present, looks into the promise of the future. " pg 70 Our Living Gospel, Wendell O. Rich

how cool is that!? faith and knowledge are (or can be) two different things. i love that line in green.. it is through faith that what we know can be the foundation of what we want to accomplish. so rad!

well my friends. this is what happens when i'm left on my own to come up with somethin! a whole bunch of random thoughts. i hope everybody is doing well at home. i Love and miss you all, and pray for you often! I'll be in Fallon for another 3 weeks or so, i hope to hear from some of you, all of you soon! s/o to Sister Liz Green.. she served here in Fallon and had to go home for medical attention. pray for her recovery! :)  i received mail from her this last week. she found the blog already.. hope you're doing well verde! 

that's all for now. thanks for your support! until next week my friends!

elder stooooz sykes