Repentance and Specificity

MMMMMM, missionary work.  I'm so happy to be out here.  My hardest/worst days of my mission thus far have been in this past week, but also some of the best moments.  Funny how that works :) 

I read all of Doctrine and Covenants this week, and one thing that really stood out to me was in Sec. 75, verses...24-27ish i think.  It's talking about the church supporting the families of missionaries while they are gone.  I just loved it!  So even though our family is blessed to be able to provide for itself, and i'm not the one who supported the family, and you aren't destitute or anything,  the principle that I got from it was that God really CARES about the families.  he didn't send missionaries out without providing for their families at home.  And i have faith that Heavenly Father can and will and probably already has blessed you all back home, and that makes me happy.  Also, just a sidenote, I don't think I could possibly have a more supporting family back home, so thank you.  A lot of missionaries make the sacrifice to come out here against the desires of one or both parents, and deal with family drama every week on P day.  I am so blessed to have you all as my family.  I feel so dumb for the times in my life I didn't appreciate that. 

  I have two spiritual thoughts kind of, that I've been thinking about a lot this week, and I really want to share, and then I'll talk a bit about my week! 

 

First, Repentance.  I've been thinking a lot about it, and I don't know if i'm the only one who feels this way or has ever thought this, but here's what I've been thinking.  We hear ALL the time in the scriptures about prophets crying for their people to repent because of their wickedness.  Naturally, we often talk about repentance along with serious sins, like with the law of chastity, or word of wisdom.  Nothing wrong with that, but here is a side effect that i've seen in my life, but I can't really generalize to everyone i guess.  But I will.  So, I think that because of the association we so often hear with serious sin and with wickedness, I think it's easy to think of Repentance as being something you do when you are bad.  Which is just such a stupid way to look at it.  Our Saviour atoned for our sins, not to "make us repent."  He allowed us to repent.  What repentance really is, in my opinion, is two things.  1) change, and along with that, 2) drawing closer to Jesus Christ.  Repentance isn't something "bad people" or people who do really bad things do (although when you do something bad you should obviously repent) it's something everyone can and SHOULD be doing EVERY day.  Hopefully if you are reading this you already understand what i'm trying to say. I'm just dumb so it took me a long time to think of this.  the point is, Repentance is us trying to be better, and be closer to our Saviour, so we should do it every day.

 

Second, specificity.  That sounds weird.  Hope I spelled it right.  anyways, we know in prayers we aren't supposed to use "vain repetitions" we should always be sincere in our prayers.  but also, something I've been learning these past few months is how important it is to be specific.  There is a huge difference, i believe, in praying before you go tract "please bless us as we tract"  and saying something more like "Heavenly Father, as we do A B and C tonight as we tract, please help us to  accomplish X Y and Z".

 

I have a problem with the word "blessing" or "bless" in general actually.  It is tossed around soooo often that people don't even think about it.  Only LDS people hear that and accept that.  To everyone else, it's a pretty empty word/phrase.  you have to promise SPECIFIC blessings.  If you are asking someone to give up smoking so they can be baptized, and you promise them "blessings", so what?  they have no idea what that even means.  Neither do you probably.  Not until you think about it at least.  

 

On a tangent, please pray for our investigators if you get the chance.  On the blog there wont be names, but family, please pray for ( .... people Chase has learned to love, along with the specific things they need.)

 

That's obviously just a fraction of the people out here we see that need help.  You don't need to pray for all of them, or any of them if you don't want, but I'd really appreciate it.   

 

Some stuff that happened this week....well, Elder D is here instead of Elders K and H.  So that's way different.  There's a ton I can learn from Elder D.  He's a pretty good missionary and has been out for about 20 months.  He's been teaching me a lot...   Elder W has been really sick for the past couple days, which has made missionary work a lot harder, but we haven't been letting it slow us down.  We are all determined to make this a successful transfer. 

 

Last thing I really want to say is just that I LOVE missionary work.  I really really do.  I'm pretty unhappy about P day right now, not just because I don't like P days, but because we have so much stuff to do, I don't feel like taking a break right now.  weird but true.  We are gonna make this a good week, and next week, I'm gonna have some miracles to report. 

 

Love you!