Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Service kicks those negative thoughts!

9.14.15
This week has been a busy week, full of wonderful experiences. God has been so good to elder Jensen and I as we continue to transition to covering two areas. At the begging of the week we were again able to go see Karla and Grady. We brought along one of my favorite members brother Wright. We taught them the gospel of Jesus Christ, the 3rd missionary lesson. The lesson went great, and brother Wright shared a powerful testimony of how the gospel has blessed his life. He even shared a little from his conversion story. At the end of the lesson we had an open conversation with them and Grady said that he has been very grateful for the lessons and has felt that they have helped him gain a greater understanding of where God wants him to go. Karla also commented that they want to be better at coming to church, as well as reading the Book of Mormon together. It is always a great blessing to see the people we are teaching come up with their own commitments and things they want to work on. The mission president's fireside is actually next week, and we are praying that Karla and Grady will be able to come to it. It would be so good for them to hear a couple share their conversion story that is centered on the Book of Mormon. We were also able to go see Bob. It has been a long time since I have seen him, but it was good to be able to meet with him again. We did the usual Book of Mormon reading with him, and then he opened up and talked about how he needs to forgive his dad. We just listened as he talked about his concerns and what was holding him back from forgiving his dad. Elder Jensen was also able to share an amazing personal experience he had with forgiving someone at his school. We are going to study and prepare a lesson for Bob about the importance of forgiveness and help him understand how to go about doing it. I know forgiving his dad, will bring him a lot of peace and happiness.
   This week we also had a small miracle happen, that made my testimony of the reality of a loving Heavenly Father grow so much. On Thursday night we had just finished dinner, and we were about to go out and start working the area. At this same time satan started putting a lot of negative feelings about the work into my head and I started loosing motivation. We got on our bikes and started riding towards the area we were going to work in. I did my best to push the feelings out of my head. Well we got to this street and started trying to contact people. As we were contacting we say this lady by her car loading stuff into it and noticed a moving sign in front of the house. We asked her if we could help her and she went inside to ask the owner. Usually when we ask people if we can help them they politely say no, but this time it was different. The owner said that she would love our help, and that we were an answer to her prayers. She told us that she had been given a very short time to have everything moved out of her house and that she wasn't able to find very many people to help her. She put us to work packaging up all the food in her pantry, we also helped her organize her garage. It was an amazing experience to be able to be a tool in the Lords hand to help this family in their time of need! They said they wanted us to come over for dinner at their new house, and took down our number. We are hoping to be able to share our message with them in the future. They are a very sweet family, and I am very grateful that God put them in our path. 
  We are finding so many amazing people to teach, and I know that this area is getting very close to having baptisms. This work is real, and there really are people that God is preparing to receive the gospel. I love being part of this work, and I love being able to serve and love people. It brings me so much happiness to be able serve the wonderful people of Texas, and to hear their stories and life experiences. This church is true, Jesus Chirst is our savior and God truly does love each one of us. Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Griffin


*This is a couple days before transfers. The first on is elder Taylor and I, and the second is my zone leader elder Webb (I was making a weird face for some reason:)) They were both awesome missionaries!  

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