Tender Mercies

Family and Friends,

Sorry for the solemn letters I have sent over the last few weeks.  I guess it was just one of those down moments in my mission.... When you feel like you are doing everything you can and nothing seems to go your way.

I have really had to find patience out here.  I thought I was somewhat patient after working at a physical therapy clinic for over a year but nope, didn’t really prepare me for this.  The hardest part is having people say they will do something, but 99% of the time they don’t go through with it.  It’s getting hard to even have the hope that they will actually do what they tell us they will.  So to make a long story short, we had a bunch of baptism dates drop because people won’t go to church.

Anyway President Miller at zone conference passed out a new Book of Mormon and 5 Highlighters to every missionary in the mission and started a new reading plan to finish the Book of Mormon by February.  I’ll give you the details below if you want to do something similar.

"Finding Christ in the Book of Mormon"

8 pages a day- 30-40 mins of "Studying"-(note "studying" not "Reading")

5 colors of highlighters for each of the 5 topics to search for

1.  Jesus Christ- The names, references to his name, and also his titles.

2.  His attributes

3.  His words- anything he is literally saying

4.  His Doctrine- (Faith, Repentance, Baptism, Holy Ghost, Enduring to the End) and also any sub-categories to his doctrine IE. Prayer

5. Happy Scriptures- any scriptures that you like or receive revelation for.

I am now just finishing 2nd Nephi and I have a whole new outlook on the Book of Mormon.  Not only do I like the thought of having a Book of Mormon that is just entirely marked up with references of Christ but I am learning new things I have never seen before.  Like the journey of Nephi's family to the promise land is closely similar to our path here on earth, i.e. the Liahona is the Holy Ghost and guides us back to Heavenly Father (Promised Land) if we follow it, it works.  If we don’t, we are lost.  Notice how all of his family had access to it, but had their agency and chose not to follow it. (Laman and Lemuel) and they had to be repeatedly brought back into the right path.  Just like us.  We have been given the Holy Ghost, and we have our agency, and many CHOOSE not to follow its promptings.  But even though they repeatedly strayed, God always allowed them back.

Anyway once we started to read the Book of Mormon every day, there was a change.  People that seemed like we would need to drop them started to accept baptism dates; we started to find people "More Prepared" to hear the gospel.  And best of all God gave us a Christmas present, a baptism.  We had been teaching this young girl the lessons before she was going to be baptized and she was actually scheduled to be baptized the week before, but her uncle, who was going to perform the actual baptism broke his arm and they postponed it another week.  Well we found out Tuesday that she had just turned 9 years old on Monday and it became a "Convert Baptism" for our numbers and everything.  On top of all that, since the uncle couldn't do it, I had the opportunity to perform my first actual baptism. And it was honestly was one of the most memorable moments of my life.

In closing, I just wanted to challenge you all to increase your studies in the Book of Mormon, to receive blessings and guidance in your lives.  It’s like a Telephone.  There are 2 parts, the speaking part and the listening part.  Prayer is the speaking part of the phone and the listening part is where we wait to hear our answer.  We can pray our hearts out, but without scripture study, we get no answer.  And vice versa, one without the other is useless.  So please make it a habit. I love you all. Until next week

-Elder Stewart