Simple solid testimony of the humble

Well we spent the majority of this week rubbing shoulders with the zone leaders and freezing  in their house, Mexico is very cold in the winter man! Haha but we actually had a really fun Christmas together. We bought a ton of food, A TON, like steak, and sausage, and pie and candy and ate til we got sick (second time in Mexico that that has happened, the other time was with the sister in Durango who gave us each a cake, yes I'm still talking about it and will until the day I die).

We also went to the mission house and had a dinner with president, had multi-zone activities, I SAW A SNOWMAN IN TORROEN!!! I don't know how, it's cold but there is no snow so who knows how it got there. But after like 4 days of Christmas festivities we had to return to our beloved Tlahualilo and work again.

When we got back we had a really cool experience with a less active here named C. He is a very poor, and uneducated man, but his biggest trial is that he has a lot of problems with his past, he is an ex missionary but made some bad choices and was eventually excommunicated. After 8 years he decided to repent and be baptized again. He was re-baptized about 3 years ago but to this day he can not and will not forgive himself. He lives with the idea that Christ's atonement is sufficient for everyone except him (I would actually say that is a very common lie of Satan, I hate that guy). So he went inactive after a while and when I got here he was pretty depressed.

Little by little we have helped him accept what the atonement and repentance means and this week he was completely different. He has gone with us for 3 to 4 hours every day to help us find people here in Tlahualilo. He has given us the names of several families and we are finding old investigators through him as well. Last night we had a lesson about the Book of Mormon with him present and I asked him to share his testimony of the Book of Mormon, and he did, and there was nothing flashy or special about his testimony but I felt the power of his testimony about the Book of Mormon. He really does know that it's true and as I looked at him bearing his testimony I felt the Holy Ghost carry his simple words to us and make them powerful. I felt Gods love for him, I can't really explain what it was, but as I looked at this guy who has been beat down by doubt, sin, and Satan for years I felt a small part of the love the Christ must have for him. His simple testimony was made powerful by the Holy Ghost.

One time Brigham Young talked about hearing the testimony of an uneducated man and how He (Brigham Young) received a witness of the Holy Ghost through the simple testimony of his friend. I too now have felt that and that truly it is not a knowledge of the gospel nor the doctrine that will give us success, nor is it speaking in perfect Spanish, nor the charisma or talent of the missionaries that will help people truly come unto Christ, but the simple solid testimony of the humble. I know that is true.

Testimony grows on a mission

I have very little time right now, we are getting ready to get on a bus and head off toward a bigger town to spend Christmas in our zone. 

 

I just want to share a quick thought about testimonies. I don't really know when it happened, I never had a moment exactly when The Lord told me but over the course of 11 months in Mexico and over a year now in the mission, I know that the Church really is true. I know that Joseph Smith really did see our Heavenly Father and that through him Jesus Christ restored His church. I know that the Book of Mormon is the word of God. 

 

It's weird but I really am a million times stronger in my faith than I was when I left. It didn't come in a particular moment, I can't really think of a time when it hit me but as I teach lessons now I do feel it more and more every day that this really is the truth that Christ Himself came to proclaim. A testimony isn't gained until you gotta put it to the test, and that is what is done every day here in Mexico, and I am grateful for that. I love the mission in that you either have to grow in your faith or you gotta go home, haha there's no hanging out in the mission. 

Elder Roberts

Happiness verses Comfort

This week we had a very interesting talk with a less active here in Tlahualilo, and its something that applies to me so much. We were talking about happiness and comfort. While we are here on the earth we become beings that are constantly searching for both comfort and happiness and one thing that is very quickly evident is that they are not the same and actually in a lot of cases they are opposites. Before this world we were happy in a very real sense. As we enjoyed the presence of our perfect Father we knew what it was to be happy. Our eternal nature is to become like Him to enjoy such a state of happiness as He does. In the life before we learned from Him how to become like Him and we longed to do so. Satan tried to tempt us into choosing a plan in which it would be impossible to sin but also it would be impossible to progress to the state of our Father.

Luckily our Father protected us from such a plan for all those that chose to follow His. The plan of Satan sounds pretty good at first, not one soul would be lost, but to be forced into obedience and to never progress by our own choices would also mean we would never be exalted either. And so we come into this world but this time with three things we didn't have before, a physical body, the lack of our Fathers physical presence, and without the memory of what we were before. And so here we are, we come into the world as something a lot different than we were, in a physical body and without the presence or memory of Perfect Beings we all of a sudden don't think about eternal happiness and start thinking about immediate comfort. What is eternity for a temporal being?

The natural man that we are in this world doesn't like to be uncomfortable, above all else if the natural man is uncomfortable than automatically we gotta find a something to make us comfortable, at any cost, emotional, physical, mental, and yes spiritual. And so the natural man becomes both an enemy to God and to himself, as he selfishly looks for the things that bring comfort and loses the things that bring happiness.

One huge truth I have learned on the mission is that if the natural man is comfortable, nobody cares if the divine part of us is miserable. I have talked to so many people on this mission that have openly confessed that "Yes I am miserable, but I am comfortable, so why change." It's crazy how easily we settle for the comfortable in place of happiness. How quick we call it quits on God in the minute that He lets us pass through some hard times. We accepted such trials before we came and now that were here we are understanding the price of exaltation - that to truly be happy...we have to be uncomfortable in the natural man sense. Haha and that's hard!

When I started the mission I was the most uncomfortable I have ever been in my life, haha literally nothing was the same, and so the natural man was screaming, and crying and whining and suffering, haha I had fed him for twenty years and now that he had to be starved he wasn't going down without a fight. I so often felt like I was happier before the mission happier before I accepted the Lords will before my own, now a year latter I look back and I realize I was very very comfortable, I had never really done anything I didn't want to do in my life, and here I was having to sacrifice everything for the greater good.

Why did Christ come into the world without any worldly comforts? Why didn't he have a house, or money, or anything in terms of the world? Because He knew what I am learning every day, that to be happy is to be uncomfortable in the natural man, to progress is to starve out the natural man, to deny yourself and do whats gotta be done. One of my favorite teachings of Christ is found in Matthew 10:38-39

 38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

 39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life  for my sake shall find it.

To avoid our the crosses in our lives is the mission of the natural man. To find our own life, pursue our own comfort is what we have come here to overcome. Christ wouldn't have been the Savior unless He was willing to give up everything that is comfortable to the natural man, and sacrifice all that our Father required. He did it, and is our Savior, now we, as disciple of Christ, gotta learn how to do the same, one selfish struggle after another....

The Book of Mormon is true!!

Well to be honest Tlahualilo is a very special area. It's a very small town in the middle of nowhere (rancho in spanish) and in total there are.... 20 active members and none of them show up on time, and like 200 inactive members. The missionaries, and the branch president are the only priesthood in the area so we are in charge of the branch, tithing, activites, reactivation, everything. I also got here and in total we have 4 investigators...so I don't really know what was going on here before but we aren't teaching alot... 

So we gotta change all that. One thing that we are going to change is how we present the Book of Mormon. The majority of the people in Mexico (that have heard anything about the Book of Mormon, which isn't a lot) believe that the Book of Mormon is the mormon bible and we don't believe in the Bible. They also don't realize that we believe in Jesus Christ. In preach my Gospel it says 

"The Book of Mormon, combined with the Spirit, is your most powerful resource in conversion. It is the most correct of any book on the earth (see introduction to the Book of Mormon). It teaches the doctrine of Christ plainly, especially in the lessons you teach investigators. Use it as your main source for teaching the restored gospel."

This is something that we honestly haven't done a lot in my other areas. We use the Book of Mormon as homework for the investigator, as a back up to the lesson, if we don't use it as the main source of our teaching the Spirit can not testify of what we are teaching. The Book of Mormon and the Spirit are everything and if people only view the Book of Mormon as homework than clearly they will not gain a testimony of it and we are not using it nearly to it's full potential to bring people to Christ. So the other night I was praying and thinking about how we can reopen the area and the next day I had a the idea, we would contact with the Book of Mormon (We have never contacted with the Book of Mormon before because when people hear Book of Mormon they all of a sudden have no time to talk) and in the first lesson explain who Christ is, Who God is, and what the Book of Mormon is. We are basically gonna just explain articles of faith 1 and 8 in the first lesson and clearly explain what is the Book of Mormon in the first visit. The Book of Momon is in L1 of preach my gospel but at the end and in this mission we divide the lessons into 2 visits so we don't get around to the Book of Mormon until the second visit and by the end of the second visit almost nobody cares enough to find out whether the book is true. This week we are going to try and change it up here to see how the testimony of the Book of Mormon can help people realize the truth immediately. If we just dedicate a whole lesson to helping people understand who is God the father, Jesus Christ and how the Book of Mormon and the Bible work together to bring us to them I am confident that people will be more receptive to when we get around to things like apostasy and pre-mortal life. So to be honest we are going out of order of the lessons but luckily we have the freedom to do so according to what the Spirit says. 

Also got to see the first presidency's Christmas devotional yesterday and it was pretty awesome. This week was hard because to be honest we have no support from members, we don't have the comforts of the city, life in a rancho is tough and I was in a bad mood because we don't have all of the comforts of civilization. One of the messages in the devotional  was that Christ descended from heaven to be born in a barn, to live life without any modern comforts and to work day in day out without concern for personal needs. Why did He do that? in His own words ´´to do the will of His Father´´. Did I come on the mission to work or to be comfortable? To do the will of my Heavenly Father or my own. It's hard to walk around all day, take cold showers, eat gross food haha, wah wah wah but at the end of the day I and every other missionary have to realize we aren't here to be comfortable, we are here to sacrifice. I have lived in the lap of luxury for 20 years before the mission and its probable that I will do so the rest of my very privileged life, Why should I have to complain that I have to give it all up for a very small time. I learn or relearn something every day. 

2 Challenges 1. Pray that people will be receptive to the Book of Mormon por favor. 2. And read the Book of Mormon and send me your testimony.

Elder Roberts

Transfered to Tlauwalilo

Well I got transferred out of no where, because of Christmas the exchange week got changed, so I got transferred a week early, haha and so here I am in a little town called Tlauwalilo, its in Coahuila, so I left the nice, green state of Durango and once again am in the desert.

As far as this week I first want to share an experience we had with two separate lessons in the same day. First we go into a house and I don't know why but I started feeling really angry and nervous and I could not speak Spanish, it was so weird, it was like when I first started my mission. We kept struggling through the lesson and at the end the lady starts telling us about spirits and a demon that supposedly haunts her son, it was a really nasty feeling and I have heard other stories like this on the mission but this was the first one that felt real.  But right after that lesson we had one with E, his girlfriend, and O. and R. and the Spirit was really strong and I could speak and teach like it was no problem. So I just want to say it really is 100% the Spirit in the mission, when the Spirit isn't in the lesson things fall apart fast and when the investigators are doing weird things with bad spirits it goes bad even faster. It was actually a really cool experience to see such a dramatic difference between two lessons, one with and one without the Spirit of God. 

As far as O, R,  E, and his girlfriend  We had a lesson with them right before I left and they really have progressed so much. When we found E he was dead, he wasn't a fan of life, dead spiritually, he just kind of drifted, but after three weeks of coming to church and several months of listening to the message of the gospel it really is amazing to see how different he is. He is way happier, his relationship with his kids is way stronger and as he realizes that not only does God love him but that he has a responsibility to set the example for his kids and so to meet that demand he steps it up every week. O will be baptized in two weeks, R the week after, and E will be active again in the church in two weeks as well. 

My new companions name is Elder P, he is from Mexico City and seems to be a really funny cool guy. He only has 4 months in the mission but has been in this area since he started so he knows it well. He told me on one of the two - 3 hour bus rides we had to take to get here that we have exactly 5 investigators in the entire area, supposedly they dropped almost all their investigators last week because no one was progressing, welcome to the mission, haha naw but it just means we gotta contact a lot in the next couple weeks.