CTR Missionary !!!  I love this shot!!

4 September 2016

Hey Folks,

This has been a great week. I brought one of the Elders in the district here to do exchanges for a day on Friday and it was great! It's great to get to work with someone and learn from them. The hardest part was that he is a Chinese speaking Elder and I am as you know a Malay speaking Elder. So that was both a great thing and kind of unfortunate but it's all good! If we met a Chinese person, the other elder who I went on the exchange with, would talk to him, if they were Malay, I would talk to them. Everyone still can't believe that a white man can speak Malay. Anyway, that day, we found quite a few awesome people that stated that they were interested in learning more about the message of the Restored Gospel and it was just a really amazing day. One thing we have been trying to do more effectively is using the spirit in all of the things that we do. We prayed multiple times throughout that day that we would have the ability to speak to the people and that we would find those who were ready to receive the Gospel and what do you know, seems like we found a few of them! That was a really cool thing that happened this week.

Something I read in the Doctrine and Covenants recently (the Doctrine and Covenants is another book of scripture written by the prophets of today. Prophets of old wrote the word of God in scriptures so the ones today surely have the same purpose) in the 105th section, verse 6: "And my people must needs be chastened until they learn obedience, if it must needs be, by the things which they suffer." 

That really hit me. It helped me think about more the will of God and how it's not always supposed to be kicked back and relaxed. The will of God is to have us become like Him, our Father. Just like all Fathers want their children to be like them. He does that through refining and working and teaching until we learn. I hope you kind of get what I'm going at. Look at this video, it's one of my favorites and explains that a bit better than me.https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2014-11-010-the-refiners-fire?lang=eng 

Anyway. I wrote about this before but I want to say it again. Read the Book of Mormon. Don't be persuaded by man this is true. We are all equal spirit children of Him. He doesn't pick favorites.He is who will tell you the truth of the Book of Mormon, not any source of man. It makes me so sad whenever people tell me they don't want to learn because they have a friend or read something online that said it was bad. Where is the bad in a book that testifies of Christ? Read the book and Follow Christ's advice to believe like a little child and you will manifest miracles. Adults and teenagers always have such skeptical views about everything. Become like a child and read that book. If you don't have one let me know and I will make sure that you get one. 

Love

Elder Hanks