This week was interesting overall. Tuesday we had our meeting with Elder Pearson (http://new.lds.org/church/
Elder Pearson was probably the best teacher I have ever seen in my life. He is very, very smart and understands his audience very, very well. He drew us lots of graphs and pictures to illustrate his point and they worked extremely well. He was very charismatic and pretty straightforward with us. He talked to us a lot about who we think we are now and who we really are/can become. He talked about we might think that we are a certain way and because of that we don’t want to lose who we really are and become like everyone else, but what we really need to understand is that we have no idea who we really are if we think in that way. That prevents us from changing and progressing, which is what we are supposed to do. He further told us that we existed before this life and made the decision to come here -- something I’ve heard 1000 times, but this time he added that if we existed before this life and can't remember it, then it is kind of judgmental of us to say we know who we are when we don’t even know many of the things that we have done. He talked about a lot of other things too, but his final point was really the most important. He reminded us that we are all literal spirit sons and daughters of God and that if we really understood that, we would not want to do anything except for His will. That doesn’t mean we all have the same personality or the same way of doing things. But it does mean that if we love our heavenly father anywhere close to the amount that he loves us, we will want to do everything that we can to align our will with His. That was how Jesus Christ lived a perfect life. He aligned His will perfectly with that of the Father.
We did a lot of service. We put in somewhere around 25 hours of straight service. On Wednesday we helped our investigators who have already moved like 5 times pack up their stuff again. We are now very efficient at packing their things. We can take their tables apart super fast and pack their truck perfectly. Then on Thursday we spent 4 hours in court with our 1 member that only speaks Spanish. He had gotten a ticket for letting somebody without a license drive his car, but he didn’t understand that he was supposed to go to court the first time, so he got arrested and spent a few hours in jail and then we had to go to court with him to translate because nobody in this town speaks Spanish. Once it all got straightened out the judge just had him pay his ticket and court fees and that was it, so he still got $300 back from bail he had to have posted. It was pretty ridiculous. Ended well though, so that’s good. Friday we started the longest move of all time. It was just us, their family, and a couple other people helping and it was completely unorganized. Absolutely everything was super heavy. The worst was the hot tub. That thing was huge. Eventually we got it up onto the trailer with 7 guys lifting. When we got to where it was going we had way too far to go, but thankfully we figured out that if we put 2 X 4s under it that it would be really easy just to slide to where it was going. It was. It took us like 30 seconds after that. We continued the same move again on Saturday, and got it all finished. It was really good for them though and helped them a lot.
We didn't make a whole lot of progress with people this week, but we definitely helped a lot of people, so it's ok. We did teach Tom and Gail. Tom believes that anyone can have the priesthood and that anybody who writes a good book is inspired and that the book is true. He believes all good religious books are given by divine revelation. So, he believes the Book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but misses how that means that everything else we are teaching them has to be true. Any advice?
