Inviting the Spirit in our daily lives

Dear Reed,

 

Is Rex really in Gresham? That's crazy! The white mountains are taking Oregon by storm. Gresham is the cream of the crop! I love it so much here. The people are great, my ward is great, and my companion is great. The weather is not getting cooler, nor will it ever get cooler I fear. It is blazing hot here! I thought Oregon was really cool but it's so stinkin hot! That's okay though, i still love it.

 

Tell the tiny boy I love him! I wish I could watch him play football this year. That would be awesome if you had Austin over for family home evening! Make sure to invite some non members to that.

 

Well, I better tell you about our crazy week. So we are teaching this guy named Scottie. He is a little older than me and his girlfriend is a member. We were able to set a baptismal date with him for the 27th of September! The real highlight is Lois, the blind and partially deaf lady. We set her date for a couple weeks away and she is so excited. I want to go more in depth with my emails but I don't have time and there's no way you can grasp how amazing these things are. I just can't adequately put it in words. My explanations don't do it justice. But we have those two baptisms coming up and I'm stoked about them.

 

We had an awesome experience this week that strengthened my testimony of God's timing. So we are teaching this family and the kids won't pray unless we bring them cookies. We really want them to pray, so we made cookies on our lunch hour and planned to bring them with us for our lesson later that night. Well, we forgot the cookies, so we had to run home later in the evening to pick them up and a few minutes after we closed the door we heard a knock. We went over and opened it and lo and behold, here stands in front of us the 22 year old comcast guy trying to sell us internet. We told him that we don't use internet on our missions and that opened up a ton of questions about what we do and don't do as missionaries. This discussion was a great opening act for him to begin asking questions that pertained to the plan of salvation. We started teaching him while we stood there and decided we wanted to go a little more in depth. Sister Morby makes each missionary these laminated cut outs of the points of the plan of salvation, so we all sat down of our concrete porch, laid out the cut outs, and began teaching victor the plan of salvation. It was amazing! He was so intrigued and he just kept asking more and more questions. We still had to go teach the cookie family so we had to cut the lesson short, even though we had talked for about 45 minutes. We exchanged numbers and he really wants us to meet some of his friends too. That night we got texts from him. He had been on Mormon.org looking up answers to more questions and texting us and asking the ones he couldn't find on there. He really wants to learn more and he asked us to meet him at this vegan burrito place somewhere in Portland. Portland is weird. I could never see Eagar having a vegan burrito place. I'm not even sure what that is. But, we were excited and we are going to be teaching him this week.

 

So every Tuesday and Thursday we teach New Testament and Book of Mormon classes down at the church. Remember the Free Masons we did service for? Well, we invited them and a couple of them came. We found out that they live in sandy so we passed them off to the sandy sisters, but that was really exciting! They are very interested in learning more.

 

I got to speak in sacrament meeting yesterday and my topic was "inviting the spirit in our daily lives." It got me thinking, when I'm invited somewhere, what usually is the driving force that makes me want to go? Food. It's always food. I believe that's the same with our spirit. We are promised as we take the sacrament that we "may always have His spirit to be with" us. The key word is may. He may stay, he may not. It all depends on what you feed him! I know that as we read our scriptures daily and pray and ask for the spirit to attend us, we can more fully enjoy His influence in our daily lives. And who doesn't want that? In Galatians we read that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance." I need each of those blessings and qualities daily as we all do. The spirit is just like Dad at any family function, He won't stay unless you feed Him. We need to nourish our spirits daily just like we do our bodies. Well, that's all I got for now! I love you all very much! Happy birthday to stellaphant! Work hard, pray hard

Sister U