Hello family and friends!
How is everything?! Tell me about what has been going on in your lives people, I love getting emails and letters! So if you have been sending some, keep doing so I really appreciate it. If you haven't and you want to, go for it! I love to hear how everyone is doing.
Well mission life is mission life here in Nebraska. The ward is just as awesome as ever, and has some of the coolest and greatest people. There were probably 75 kids in the primary program last week! Yea, talk about a mad house in the chapel when all the kids were getting up and down, but it was nice and the Spirit was definitely there as the children sang and bore testimony about gospel truths.
As always, this week was super busy, tiring, and full of awesome experiences. There was perhaps a central message to it all though, and that was the importance of following the Spirit, and how to really recognize promptings. I'm pretty sure that knowing how to be guided by the Spirit and knowing when we receive promptings from the Holy Ghost is perhaps one of the hardest things to learn and to master in this life. Something I have come to know over the past week as well as things that were reminded to me was that whenever we are acting on good thoughts and impressions, we are always following the guidance of the Spirit! yes there can be times when the Spirit will direct us in a very direct way so that we know that it is a prompting, but oftentimes the voice of the Holy Ghost comes as quiet thoughts that as long as we are focusing on being, as Elder Bednar calls it, a good boy or a good girl, then we do not need to worry about whether a thought or impression is of the Spirit. Why? Because if our will is in line with that of the Lord's, and we have a desire to do good and to follow the promptings we receive, then naturally our thoughts well be directed by the Spirit of the Lord and we will not have to worry about if we followed our own thoughts or the Spirit, because they will be one in the same!
Stemming from this is the wonderful gift of agency. I have come to really understand and appreciate this great gift from our Heavenly Father. as human beings with the capacity and the potential to reach Godhood, we have to learn to choose good from evil and how to make these decisions on our own. Our all knowing Father in Heaven respects our agency, so naturally he will not tell us what to do with every decision we have to make. If he did, how would we grow? By making our own choices we learn how to exercise agency and exercise critical thinking. As long as we are in tune with the Spirit, we can receive confirmation that our choices are right. So, when we have to make decisions about careers, schooling, marriage or whatever the case may be that are big decisions in life, God allows us to choose. Repeatedly we find in the scriptures the witness someone receives comes after they exercise faith. Since faith is action, we must act and choose for ourselves, and then let the confirmation come from our Heavenly Father after we start to travel down that path that it is the correct thing for us to do. Obviously if it was not the path that is best for us, our Heavenly Father will straighten us out and help us get to where we need to be. This doesn't mean we were misguided by the Spirit, but rather that we have to learn how to correctly exercise agency. Of course this is different for everyone, but the principle is the same.
Goodness there is so much more I could say about things that have happened this week but I don't have to time finish writing them all if I started! That is why we have journals. that is another thing I have come to appreciate, journal writing. Taking the time each night to reflect on the day and the Lord's hand in my life is a blessing. I love seeing all that he has done for me and being able to see what I have learned throughout the day. Many prophets have told us to do that so... write in journals!
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