Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 8:12 AM
Subject: Doing Great!

 

This week went pretty fantastic. Mom just e-mailed me and told me about how little you really need to survive. I can agree with that. For the last 2 weeks I've been living off of bananas and cans of tuna fish for breakfast/lunch. Nice and cheap... and quite filling also. We had a nice surprise this week also. It was supposed to be our week with bikes but somehow we got blessed with the rental car for another week, and we get it again this week. So basically we've been getting unlimited miles in a nice 2014 Chevy Impala for the last 2 weeks and we are still going strong haha. Yup, missionaries in the USA are a little spoiled.

 

You said something about Iva doing fire-knife dancing. Did I tell you that I met a 3-year in a row world champion for fire-knife dancing? We went and visited him at the hospital about 2 weeks ago. No he did not cut/burn himself to go to the hospital... he just got bit by a spider.

 

This week we did a ton of tracting which actually turned out to be pretty fun. You meet a lot of, how to I put it... interesting people when you are knocking on random doors all day. So now we have a nice big pool of people to work with which is really nice. Gives us more time in people's homes and less time walking in the street.

 

Elder Parry and I are always trying to find service projects to work on with people. This week we helped an old guy (70's) move a bunch of gravel into his driveway. He's going to pour a brand new driveway but first he's gotta put gravel down so that he can pour on top. It's a long driveway too so he's got about 18 tons of gravel that he still has to move. So that will be a pretty good project that we can help him out with once a week or so. He can't really do the work very quickly on his own so he really appreciates the help and Elder Parry and I appreciate being able to do some nice hard labor every once in a while.

 

Something I noticed in my studies this week. I was reading in Alma 43 which is, as you can guess, about a war between the Nephites and Lamanites. It's pretty cool as you read through because you can see a nice pattern that you see in a lot of other scripture also. Verse 9 = Desire/Purpose. Verse 19 = Preparedness/Action/Faith. Verse 23 = Prayer. Verse 26 = Unity. Verse 50 = Success. So as you go through you can see that fighting against temptation or other bad things in your life always starts with a desire and a purpose. If you don't have a desire to become better and change our lives then we never will. After we develop that desire we act on faith that we can change by putting on "the whole armor of God" though prayer, scripture study, church attendance, etc. That leads to the ability of being able to become united with those that share your same values and those that are fighting for the same cause, which ultimately brings about success. A lot of times we look through the "war chapters" of the Book of Mormon and think "how the heck am I supposed to apply this to my life?". What we fail to realize a lot of the time is that we are in a war. Once you realize that it becomes a lot easier to apply those chapters.

 

Well have a good week. Love you all.

 

     Love

       -Elder Nyholm