Ahhhh

 

This week I got to celebrate my favorite holiday, El Día de los Muertos!!! There is something so incredibly loving about this Latin American holiday. Looking back, and celebrating our ancestors. Buying them gifts, thanking them for all they have done. It is so beautiful. We celebrated some of this at a authentic Mexican restaurant called "La Garnacha" and got to celebrate it with some wonderful members. Pan de Muerto is as good as it sounds by the way. 

Living in Utah we get to meet tons of different cultures. Most of the people we meet are from Mexico, Venezuela, or Colombia. Columbians speak the slowest, so they are the only ones I can really understand. But I love them all. These people have the biggest hearts in the world. 

We are teaching a family that just moved from Columbia, and are pretty catholic. But the day we met them, they let us into their house, gave us cake, and shared their believes about Christ. It was so beautiful. We have met with them 3 more times, and each time we come over, they offer us food. This family loves Christ so much, and as we have been reading The Book of Mormon with them, I can see it grow. It is such a miracle. God truly prepared these people for us. 

Another miracle. We were eating dinner with a member named Petra, she is from Venezuela and I have no idea what she says. But I was in the middle of giving our spiritual thought, and her friend just bursts in the door. She basically tells us how she has been trying to come unto God and apologized for what she was about to tell us. So we were super scared. 

But then she told us that the Holy Spirit told her that we were spirits before this life and afterwards we will be spirits until Christ comes. And, basically, she told us the whole plan of salvation. She had never been taught this before, and she doesn't know anything about the church, so this was a huge miracle. When we told her that we believe everything that the Holy Spirit testified to her, she told us she WANTED TO GET BAPTIZED!!!!! WHAAAAT!!! 

God truly does listen to our prayers, and he will always answer.

Here is your spiritual thought for the week: 

Matthew 7:7 "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:"

"Our Father in Heaven has invited you to express your needs, hopes, and desires unto Him. That should not be done in a spirit of negotiation, but rather as a willingness to obey His will no matter what direction that takes. His invitation ‘Ask, and ye shall receive’ (3 Ne. 27:29) does not assure that you will get what you want. It does guarantee that, if worthy, you will get what you need, as judged by a Father that loves you perfectly, who wants your eternal happiness even more than do you" 

This has definitely been hard for me to understand. I thought if we asked God for what we wanted, he would give it to us. But that is not how God works. There was a quote i heard recently that said:

 “If all the sick for whom we pray were healed, if all the righteous were protected and the wicked destroyed, the whole program of the Father would be annulled and the basic principle of the gospel, free agency, would be ended. No man would have to live by faith.“ Should all prayers be immediately answered according to our selfish desires and our limited understanding, then there would be little or no suffering, sorrow, disappointment, or even death, and if these were not, there would also be no joy, success, resurrection, nor eternal life and godhood”

It is really hard to come to this conclusion, especially when we only see things through our own eyes. And the world is so so sad. There is so many terrible things happening on each continent. But these are the last days, these times have been prophesied by prophets of old. And I know when we hold fast to the iron rod (or the word of God), we can truly relieve the delicious fruit of the tree of life, which is talked about in 1 Nephi 8. (The fruit of the tree of life is also known as the love of god).

Our righteousness will not determine the outcome of our lives. If it did, then Moses wouldn't have had to part the red sea. Joseph's brothers wouldn't have sold him as a slave, and Christ wouldn't have died on a cross. But God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers. 

And as we continue to exercise faith, God will bless us for our diligence. And if it is not in this life, then it is guaranteed in the next one. 

Adventures eventually, 

Hermana Reynolds :)