Wow, another amazing week! Sunday for me was very spiritual. We had 2 friends come to church and they stayed for the relief society class and they loved it! It makes me so happy seeing new faces in Church! To me I feel so much joy and love being in the church building with all of what I consider my family here in Chile. I felt so much love from all of them, and I love that other people can also start making wholesome relationships with the people that go to church! Alexia came and it was our first time meeting her! She saw a video on Social Media and wanted to come to church, so we literally met her at the church doors and she just enjoyed it so much! When they announced a ward service activity that we are going to do this Saturday, she told us she loves to paint and wants to come. She also told us how she would love for her 10 year old boy to come to church next week! I love how God is softening the people’s hearts and they are literally flocking to the light.
This week we had a pretty hard week, we felt like we had talked to everyone we had seen on the streets and everyone told us that they weren’t interested in learning more about their salvation and how Jesus can help them infinitely in their lives, which makes me really sad. It's really hard for me to see people reject the remedy that they need in their life. Especially knowing that we are their opportunity standing right in front of them to bring them their healing, help, peace, every good thing that they are missing in their life. But every person has their personal agency and God respects that, so I also must respect it. But I had some amazing personal studies and I learned some life changing things. One was about the difference of faith and hope. In Moroni 7: 40-42 I learned that we must have faith in Jesus, that he atoned for our sins and that he resurrected. And we must have hope that we will be raised to eternal life. Its the hope for the future. That we will have a better world and live with God in his mansions. I like to think about faith as a past tense, like we have faith in what Jesus has done, his life, his miracles. And we have hope for the future because of our faith. So I made a goal to have more hope. Trust in my faith and put it towards having hope. I am 100% certain that Jesus came, atoned for my sins, was resurrected, and restored his church, but now I want to use that faith to fuel my hope. In missionary work that is having more hope that people will accept Jesus, or feel the spirit, or hope that they understand us. And we can apply that to the normal world in a lot of ways! Let us have more hope for the future as we grow and strengthen our faith!
Another important lesson I learned is that Jesus always brings the truth, healing, salvation, basically everything by small and simple means. From Elder Holland's talk and from the Bible, Jesus used spit and dirt to heal a blind man. Moses used a golden serpent on a stick to save the people and all they had to do was look at it. In both examples, there were people that rejected this simple solution. The Pharisees didn’t believe the blind man and called Jesus a sinner. The majority of the people doubted and didn’t look at the brass serpent and died. God always works through simple acts and plain doctrine. When we want to follow him, we must look for the simple truths. And when we share the gospel, we must share the simple and plain truths. But that doesn’t mean that everyone will listen to us. Actually, the majority of the people are going to reject what Jesus offers. But it is worth it because there will be one blind person that we can help see or a few people we can help to just simply look at the brass serpent and live. We can’t get discouraged when we confront challenges, rejection, or opposition. It was never easy for any of the prophets whether that be prophets from the Bible, Book of Mormon, or even Joseph Smith. They all faced opposition, rejection, hate, physical persecution, and even death. Jesus Christ himself was killed by his own people. So when we have challenges or face rejection, we aren’t alone. We aren’t the only ones who have experienced it. We are just putting ourselves right beside all the people that have ever suffered for Jesus' sake. And in the end, God will reward us for what we have tolerated. So let’s face this rejection or trials with joy and confidence that we know we are on the right team. Knowing that we will win at the end! It is possible with Jesus Christ! Everything is possible with him! And he loves you infinitely!!
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