Week 35 - The Cold One

Hello All!

    I hope you've all had a wonderful week and are enjoying all of your crazy successful endeavors!  I hear everyone is just great.  

Congratulations to my wonderful friend, Michael "Freshman" Graf this week especially.  He's going to be the best missionary Moscow has ever seen. 

    Things here are going just swell!  It has been somewhat cold (aka very cold), which has made it a little tough to be able to go out and do stuff.  In fact, on Saturday, we were stuck inside for much of the day.  (Did I every tell you all we're sharing a car now?  I don't think I did....whoops!  My bad.)  Anyway, we didn't have appointments, and we have to be careful on using too many kilometers on our car, so we couldn't really do much.  But that's ok!  Days like that really help me get motivated to go out and do some work!  I'm really looking forward to this week, for that reason.  We've made some pretty high goals as a companionship, and I can't wait to see what the Lord does as we go out and try our best to make it happen!

    The past week has been good, but it has been a little tough to get in with people.  We had a few cancellations, but people are still progressing well.

    Rob, of course, continues to be awesome.  We met with him a couple of times this week, and talked about quite a few things.  He had some questions about the sacrament.  He's Catholic, so he didn't quite understand how it was doctrinally sound to use water instead of wine, and we talked about Temples and family history work, as well, which he seemed to really like!  He's started to do a little bit of looking for his ancestors, but he doesn't have too much information, so it's going to be a bit of a search.

    We ran into Ben this week as we were walking around, and had a really nice chat with him.  They continue to struggle quite a bit, and it's been hard to meet with him, Beth, and Sam, but he shared a really amazing spiritual experience with us, and it's incredible to see how much the Lord continues to bless and sustain them despite everything crazy happening to them.  It just goes to show you how much our Heavenly Father really wants all of us back!

   

Our lesson with Darcy and his family also fell through this week, but we're hoping they come to a church tour that we're putting on tonight, and it will be exciting to see where things go with him!     This week I've been thinking quite a bit about subjecting ourselves to God's will, and how hard that can be sometimes.  A scripture I read in John really went along with that topic as well.  In the scripture, Jesus is just about to be crucified, and Pilate asks the Jews, "Shall I crucify your king?"  The chief priests, so puffed up in their pride, respond, "We have no king but Caesar." (John 19:15)  The Jews were so convinced that the Savior would come and deliver them physically from the rule of Rome, and when He didn't, they would have rather continued to allow the Romans to rule over them than accept the fact that their expectations of the Savior weren't correct.  How often do we do the same thing?  I know I have.  We expect something to happen when we obey, and when it doesn't, how do we react?  The wonderful thing is that if we allow ourselves, we realize that the thing that actually happened is infinitely better than what we wanted to happen.  God knows what he's doing.  We just need to trust that.

    Well, wonderful people, I hope you're having a great day and a great week!  Remember how much your Heavenly Father loves you.  Be good!  Have fun!

I love you all so much,

Elder Hafen