3 October 2016

1000 piece puzzle I did that ended up missing 2 pieces...

Showing off the cards he received from our primary kids! In his words, here's a 

cute one instead of the one below:)

This picture is on top of a big structure that people used in a city called 

Ciochecina to evaporate water to get the salt and minerals from it.

Pictures from Ciochecino

YAY CONFERENCE!!!

But before we get into that, let me talk real fast about the Word of Wisdom. You might be thinking i'm going to talk about alcohol or tobacco, but not quite. As the smart people in the textbooks would say, the Word of Wisdom is comprised of both negative and positive commandments, or in layman's terms, commandments that say "don't" or "no" and commandments that meant "do" or "yes". And we think and we focus a ton on the don't's of the word of wisdom, but not very often on the do's, and as I have recently passed through a time in my life where I ate macaroni and cheese for every meal for a couple of days, I'm going to bring up the do's. For the last two weeks (get ready, mom, cuz this I'm about to describe a person other than the Elder Liechty you dropped off a year ago) I've been eating so much healthy food! Like, oatmeal, fruits and veggies, whole grains, and hardly any sugar. That doesn't sound like much nor is it that intense of a diet, but compared to the diet I used to have, that's leaps and bounds better. And I feel fantastic because of it! Like, just cleaner and better all around. Now I have way more energy, and I don't even want to eat chocolate that much anymore. It's crazy.

But like, me... eating OATMEAL!? No one saw that coming.

Anyway, conference. I don't remember the exact words of anything I heard, either, but I do remember from Sister Reeve's talk, how when the children were asked about repentace, the answer that hit me the hardest was the one where they said something like "It will help Jesus feel like the Atonement was worth it". And I love that so much! Usually when I think of sinning and repentace, I think of how whenever I sinned I was personally the cause of some of the suffering that Jesus experienced while in the garden, but that's all I thought about. I never thought about the gratitude he must have when someone decides to actually benefit from his gift. There's two sides to it- the pain that he once had, and the joy that he has yet to have, waiting for us to use his atonement! I haven't quite figured out how to word everything I want to say concerning that, but I hope you get the gist of it

We were able to watch all the sessions except Sunday afternoon, so we'll watch that either later today or tomorrow, but yesterday we watched Saturday morning at 10, ate food that the Tufts brought to the chapel, watched Saturday afternoon at 13, then watched the Priesthood session at 16, with a nice talk with a homeless man about how the heavens are opened once again, and that revelation has not stopped with the ancient prophets, then watched the Sunday morning session live at 18!

This week we had a very interesting lesson with a less active member, who was wanting to come back and repent. He actually belongs to anpther branch, so they're now taking over helping him back to the church. He was also blind, and I was the one who was walking him around helping him find doorways and the like, which was very interesting to be needed in such an immediate and literal way. It opened up a whole new door to ways of feeling needed to me...

Also, earlier in this week, we'd been tracting- as missionaries do- and while we were on the bus, and heading towards our destination, I was prompted to go to the next stop, instead of the first one, and when the bus stopped at the first stop, I was prompted to wait again, so we did. And in the area that we've started tracting, we've already set up two return appointments with people that we've met! Two in one week! That's more than some entire two-month transfer blocks that I've had! Nice! The Lord is leading his work, and everything according to his time-table, so I don't know what will become of those lessons, but regardless, it's a huge blessing!

Have a great week!

Elder Liechty