Scriptures and Spirits

Monday, June 3, 2013

 

 

Dear Concerned Citizens,

 

Yes, It's official, I am never leaving Bremerton.  But that's good, This is a good place to settle down :) 

 

My new companion is Elder F.  He's good at basketball and scriptures, and has been our for 21 months (that means Bremerton is his Deathbed)  He's chill, so that's good, He's pretty easy to get along with. 

 

This is just about a year from when I left Bremerton last year... and here I am.  Life is so funny :)

 

I have 1 month left until my 18 month mark.  That's pretty weird, and I want to make it everything I possibly can. So I made goals for who I want to be/become for the last 6 months of my mission, and I'm starting them now at 17, that way I can hit the ground running at 18.  I've picked up a lot of experience and skills in the past however long, and I'm excited to take that for the remainder.  But I think there is a tendency to allow yourself to become jaded, and lose that greeny fire - which is silly :)  So I want to treat my last 6 months like my first 6 months- I have the world to learn, and everything should be new to me. 

 

Hey guess what, I'm in a new apartment! We moved from A-303 to A-302, right across the hall haha.  Nothing like a good ol' pilgrimage to fight complacency!  Haha, really though its pretty cool, even though we had to spend most of P-day moving.  But it's way nicer, because missionaries haven't been living there for 10 years. 

 

Guess what I've been doing every morning?  Reading the scriptures!  If you don't know what to read, read Moroni 7, specifically verse 48, along with 1 John 3:2-3.  Very interesting.

I got my hands on a DICTIONARY this week, and have been having an absolute blast.  Goodness, I love words so much.

 

I don't have the dictionary on me, or my scriptures for that matter, so bear with me, but if I remember I picked out the first 2 definitions for "purify" (like moroni 7:48) and they are something like "to make clean" and "to make free of guilt"

Very interesting, no?

And you look up "pure" and it says something like free from any adulterating or foreign matter. 

Then look up adulterate, and it says something like "to make impure by the admixture of an inferior substance, which may have the appearance of genuineness, but is debased or spurious.  Then you look up debase and its something like "to cheapen the character quality or virtue" and spurious, in a biological sense (which is where I'm going with this) means something like "to have either the form or the function of the organism, but not both" 

 

Oooh,  now we're getting somewhere. So we're talking about our spirits here, yes? Our spirits come from our Heavenly Father (Rom 8:16-17,Heb 12:9) So we each have this divine, spirit DNA.  Because of the Atonement, we each have the Light of Christ (Moroni 7:16)  (D&C 131:7 I think, not very good at D&C...) tells us that there is no such thing as immaterial matter, but that spirit matter, or light is finer and more pure.  We choose, by how we exercise our agency whether we want to be filled with light, and to be purified by the atoning blood of Christ (Mosiah 4:2) and to have love cast out fear, or by extension, have light cast out darkness. (moroni 8:16, 1 john 4:18-19)

Shoot, I only have 30 seconds left.  No time for grand conclusion.

 

But study this stuff, its way fun.

 

Love,

Lonas