Still Loving the Work!

March 2, 2015

This past week was AMAZING!! The week before was really disappointing as we had 9 investigators drop us. but we pushed through and this week we got 13 new investigators. It was so awesome. Yesterday was probably the best day. We had a really good fast and testimony meeting with a lot of really inspiring testimonies, followed up by an awesome lesson with our investigator Seth. Seth is awesome, he is a really cool guy we found this week from Turkey and he has truly been prepared to receive us. He came to church yesterday after only meeting with us once! really an awesome guy, we'll be seeing him again on Thursday this week. And we also had a crazy lesson with a guy called Nate. He is amazing with the bible, the cool part is that everything that he has been sharing with us has been our doctrine. It's been really really cool. I really can't remember anything well enough to describe it in great detail, we have had so much going on. Honestly though, I think it's really interesting. When I feel really happy and successful like this week, I feel a lot less inspired in the sense of learning life lessons. It feels like I have nothing to share with you guys as far as life changing experiences go. And it seems as though when things suck is when I’m making the most progress and growing the most. Not that that's a shock to anyone, I think that's a fairly basic principle of the gospel. It's the answer to why there is evil in the world. anyways.. I have one cool experience to share with you. A few weeks ago the ZL's in our district baptized a guy called Jaime. He is really cool and a really nice kid. He is really close with the ZL's as well. About a week after he was baptized we were waiting for the ZL's to bring us something on the side of the road and we decided not to waste time(Elder Wiser decided not to waste time) and GQ while we wait. The guy who stopped and talked to us was Timothy. Timothy was pretty cool and said that we could meet up with him sometime. This week we finally met up with him and had a lesson. it went really well and he wants to meet up again, but(here's the cool part) we found out that he lives in the ZL's area so we are going to hand him off to them on exchange right? At church on Sunday we're talking to Jaime because we thought that he would be a really good fit to go teaching with Timothy... turns out, Timothy is Jaime’s brother!!! I know right??

That's about it.

I love you guys. I'm probably going to buy some luggage today if I get the chance.

Elder Sorensen

March 9, 2015

I think something I've learned recently is to not dwell on peoples bad qualities. Everyone has thousands of things that we could look at and hate them for, but every person has equally as many things that you could love about them. Sometimes the negative things might be more apparent to you, but you just need to let those things fall and forgive them and then start focusing on the good things. It's one of the hardest things to accomplish, forgiving someone while they are wronging you or doing something wrong, but when we can accomplish that we will no longer be burdened with the painful stabbing in our heart that grudges bring. If you can ask God to help you forgive them and ask Him to help you to focus on the positive things that they do, eventually you would see them as god sees them. I'm really trying to work on this right now.

Our week has been pretty good. Just a whole bunch of finding and teaching. It's annoying now because if I told you everything in an email It would take me all day to write. Hmmmmm I'm trying to think of what to tell you about. The problem is that all of the really cool experiences are really long and not ones that I think should go up on the blog, but I guess I can just say how much I've been growing lately. I think that one of the coolest things and most annoying things about the Holy Ghost is how much he teaches you about yourself. It seems that every day of my mission there has been at least one moment where I I realize something that I need to change. And every time it happens I always think "How did I never see that before??". I firmly believe that self-realization is the key to success in this life. You can have everyone else in the world tell you that you are this or you need to work on that, but until you have a true realization for yourself that that thing is wrong and that you're guilty of it, you're not going to do anything about it.

We taught quite a few lessons this week, We have a couple of people who I think will definitely be baptized in the next two weeks as long as they have enough faith. One of them has a huge problem to overcome, but if he does, he'll be faithful for his whole life.

Love you guys!

Elder Sorensen