District P-day in Portland

Last Monday, after emailing you all that brief soliloquy, Elder Rees and I joined the rest of our district at the MAX station in Hillsboro and headed downtown for a trip of fun. We traversed the usual bizarre places of Portland for the sake of introducing Elder Rees, Sister Renslow, and Elder Walker (all greenies comprising half our district) to the oddities of life. I bought a dozen voo doo doughnuts and we all shared the few and far between tasty morsels, varying from fruit loop covered to pixy stick dust covered to Oreo and frosting covered (my favorite) pastries. It was fun being having half our district  be greenies who all but one came out together, and the other three of us having come out together at the same time. Sister Peart, Elder Hatch and I all had different aspects of downtown that we shared with the others including visiting the smallest park in the world in the middle of a street intersection and a revisit to Powell Books to discover the Mormon section of literature.

To end our P-day, Elder Walker and I joined forces and conquered his area on foot for a day. He used his youth and zeal to inspire me to new heights of thought. We met several people who were quite interesting. One of which, was a superb artist and showed us around his house of incredibly detailed and beautiful paintings. He even painted a portrait of some bald Star Trek dude and mentioned he was a Trekkie and Star Wars fan like me - yay! He had several paintings of Native American Indians and chiefs to which I attempted to guide the conversation towards their principle ancestors, the Lamanites of the Book of Mormon. It's super fun to determine how to transform casual conversations into Gospel-related dialogues. Oh, the many hobbies of a missionary.

For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
(1 Peter 4:6)

On Wednesday, we had a zone meeting in which I learned more about faith. Do we have the faith to be [fill in the blank] (i.e. healed) by Christ and His Atonement? The Zone Leaders guided and instructed us to ponder how we teach people. Our main purpose as missionaries begins with us striving to strengthen others' faith in Christ and His Atonement. However, often times it seems that we lack the faith to allow investigators and people to live the commandments and keep the commitments we invite them to make on their own. Often times we are too caught up in "how can I personally help this investigator do this certain thing" (read the Book of Mormon, pray to gain a testimony, live a commandment) and are not relying as much on "how can The Lord help this investigator do this certain thing."

When we exercise faith in the Lord enough to allow Him to perform miracles, that is when they happen. Not only after all we can do. An experience near the end of my week also elaborated this point.

As the subject line of this email suggests, I came down with a case of the stomach flu from about Thursday to Saturday. When my pains began on Thursday, I attempted to fight the cold myself by gagging myself with the dreaded pink stuff (Pepto Bismol), downing vitamin C left and right (practically like candy), and eventually setting aside my pride and coming into rest for a time. Despite all my efforts I was still feeling the discomfort of some abominable monster pounding at my insides. I referred to this being as my enemy, a "tummy ape." (lol - Mom, you and David know what I'm talking about).

So, as we always should do first, I turned to the Lord and placed my faith in Him and His powers. Similar to Enos' experience, "my soul [ached]; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own [stomach]." I also requested a blessing from my dear companion and a member. As I "waited upon the Lord," Sunday morning came and even though I began fasting that very morning, "my joy was as exceeding as was my pain" and I could "remember [my pains] no more."

I learned a great lesson this week about faith. I invite everyone who reads this to answer the question for themselves - what does it mean to you personally to have faith in the Lord? Are you, like me, just going to the Lord after you exhaust your own efforts, or can we all use the Lord's enabling powers a little more to the fullest? I know that Jesus Christ has power to do anything and so do we with God. I know that I can be more diligent in trusting the Lord that He can and will help me do all things.