Hello everyone! Thank you for all who were so kind and sent me emails or letters these last few weeks, because they have many ups and downs. I am doing my best to help guide Elder Hart in speaking better spanish / teaching with understandable, and the progress is slow and steady. This week we got to participate in community service and it was a really great change of pace in our week! We help load up a bunch of cars with food that volunteers were taking to other non-profit organizations, and while we waited for the next car, we put together hundreds of boxes! I'll attach some pictures :)
Here is a lesson that I learned through a hard experience:
This week has been very similar to the last, however it ended pretty roughly on Sunday. We had worked diligently the whole week on preparing every one of our 10 spiritual meetings, and each and every member was prepared with their topics. Each one was spaced out by half an hour, however one by one, each friend we called failed to answer, even the ones who had confirmed with us in the morning or the day before! After we explained to ninth member for the ninth time that "our friend did not answer, but thanks for being prepared and willing" I was on the verge of tears and after we hung up, I said that I need to walk outside and breathe a bit. Then as we were walking outside and I was hanging onto the hope of the last call we had left at 8:30, a text came through from that exact friend informing us that they can't participate tonight. Our last appointment had fallen 15 minutes before it started and that's when the tears finally left my face. I don't know what we could have possibly done during the week that would have changed the outcome of Sunday, but if I have learned one thing this week, it would be that thinking about the past or future too much negatively affects the thing we should be focused on - now. Last week my dad told me that the reason that the Hawaiians are some of the happiest, stress-free people is because their language is derived from one that has no past or future tense. They understood the true significance of the Savior's statement when he said not to worry about the future in Matthew 6:25. And there is a reason that both verbs are in present tense in 2 Nephi 2:25 when it says "Men *are* that they might *have* joy." This is something that I have been trying to apply more in my life, because I know it's true; what more reliable source of truth is there than the scriptures??
I love the scriptures even when they "are not plain unto me" because I have the help of modern prophets and apostles who "delight in plainness unto [their] people that they may learn" - 2 Nephi 25:4 Recently I have been studying the Old Testament and the covenants God made with his children and the insane amount of symbolism and foreshadowing to events that will happen many centuries ahead (in the New Testament and Book of Mormon) never ceases to amaze me. Our Heaveny Father is an artist, and his paintings are perfect.
Something I thought about is that we are all like little pencil artists when we create our families. Every choice we make and action we take is another stroke on the canvas of our very selves, and sometimes it's messy! But thanks to Heavenly Father's plan, through the Atonement of Christ we can erase those mistakes and re-try. The truth is that by the end of our lives we will have countless erase marks, but they don't matter because Christ is the person who lifts us up to the person we were trying to draw. He paints over the pencil according to the corrections we made and we will be PERFECT with his help. I think that made sense :)
Thank you for reading this short email! I hope you are all doing well and if you have free time, I would love to hear from you! Until next week,
Elder Hilton
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