October 21, 2013

Hey Family!

Well it sounds like a very interesting week! Very busy. I am rather jealous that coop and dad are going to get to go backpacking! And they went fishing this week. I am a little jealous. Coop told me he has a tournament coming up but didn’t tell me when, you guys will have to let me know how it goes. 

I am going to send a picture of an activity we did today it was really fun, we went to a really big park they have here and did a carne asada (kind of like barbeque) and played soccer and American football a little. 

Well this week was good and bad. We struggled with having lessons with investigators, but we were mostly focused on finding new ones. The ones we have aren’t really progressing. We didn’t find one new investigator the whole week, until yesterday we found 2 and they have potential. One of them speaks really good English so that’s kind of cool. I haven’t used English in a long time. 

In spite of not teaching lots of lessons to investigators we taught a lot of less actives. Which is one of our ideas to find new people. But it was really cool because a lot of them went to church. And we had a church attendance of 195, which was the highest I have ever seen it in any ward in the mission. The normal in our ward is 180. So it was cool to see that our work had some payoff. We have a goal to reach 200 people at church this week. 

We will get the transfers this Saturday, so that is kind of exciting. I don’t really know if I want to be changed or not. I really like my ward and my area. And I really like my comp, we get along really well and that makes life a lot easier. But if they don’t change me this time I will get changed like 2 weeks before Christmas and that would kind of suck. But whatever happens it will be good. I will let you guys know how it goes. 

Well I don’t have much to say this week, but I will share a little bit of what I learned in my studies. I was reading in Jacob and I really liked how he talks to his people. He teaches direct and calls everyone to repentance. He gives two pieces of advice which I really like. The first is to be wise. Simply that, be wise. But he isn’t talking about the wisdom of the world, but the wisdom of God. And the second actually tells us how we can be wise. He says do not try to council God. God knows what we need, when, and how. He sees things that we simply do not see. It is wise to follow his commandments and the spirit. But sometimes we think we know more than him. But I have learned our view is limited, and that really helped me this week with all the new rules. I can’t council God, I know he inspires president, so I should just be wise and do it. Our Heavenly Father like our earthy parents has a bigger perspective and sees more than us and has more experience. He knows better and that’s we he gives us commandments. The only way we can be wise is follow them, fully and completely. If we can learn to have the blind trust and faith in him to follow even the commandments that we don’t understand our life will simply be better and easier. We will be protected and will not have to learn from "sad experiences" like it says in the Book of Mormon.

I love and miss you all

Elder Utley