Last transfer begins (2/22/2016)

Hey there everyone!   This week went well!  We had a special mission tour where we got to hear from President Kearon of the Seventy.  He gave us a great message where he focused on the importance of ATTACKING your day, meaning waking up and starting with lots of energy doing exercises and eating a good breakfast and how much of a difference that can make on a mission but also for the rest of your life! He also talked about "becoming" the message.  We need to be we are teaching and show that we are happy!  And the third message was that we need to start again with an attitude of faith!  It was very inspiring and uplifting to be able to hear of his love and testimony for this work and inspired me to "try a little harder to be a little better".

Faith.  Faith is one of the biggest on going lessons of life.  You start in primary with faith is like a little seed and then move on to bigger kid stuff where you learn that faith is not a perfect knowledge of things, but when you have faith you have hope in things that are not seen but are true.  And you kind of roll along with that for a little while that faith is something you say when you talk about church stuff and keeping commandments but (at least for me) you don't really understand what a difference it can make in your life to have MIGHTY faith like the scriptures say.

Faith is a principle of power.  I am reading right now a book called "Drawing on the Powers of Heaven"  that was lent to me by an awesome member here in Gaia that talks a lot about this mighty faith.  Faith to overcome hardship.  Faith to be more happy.  Faith be more successful in what you do.  Faith to reactivate you home teaching families.  Faith can be applied in so many ways but especially in your righteous desires!  In faith there is always a little more that can be done.  Faith never says "well, I already tried, didn't work so it must not be God's will."  I love Nephi's example in the BoM with the story of the brass plates.  After the first and second unsuccesful attempts to get the plates he could have said. like his brothers, Well we tried! and called it good we "did our part".  But Nephi had true faith in his righteous desires and knew that he could do something more and in the end he achieved his righteous desires. 

I can see how this is going to apply in my life.  Whenever I have a righteous desire to achieve something such as helping a less active family coming back to church, or being succesful in my studies and profession or to overcome difficulty.  To not give up, to have mighty faith and in this way more fully realize my potential.  A strong example comes to mind is when I see people that have one visit with a less active person and say well, there is no way he is coming back and I tried but it is just not happening but I "did my part".  We can have more faith than that knowing that it is not always easy, faith only becomes mighty after it is tried and trials aren't the smoothest experiences.  So i just want to encourage all of those who have righteous desires to see what else can be done to exercise your faith more in whatever it may be that you are doing to be able to have more sucess.We can always do a bit more to do "our part".  These mortal exercises will prepare us for an eternity of things to do and accompish. 

I love you all and wish you a happy week!:)

Elder Eldredge