General Conference is awesome!

Fishing was a bust. It rained the whole time and I didn't catch any fish.

General Conference is awesome as a missionary!!! We watched all five sessions at the church and I've got about 6 pages of notes. It was really weird that they all started at 12 instead of 9. I learned a ton though. I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but I'm starting to get the feeling we need to be keeping the Sabbath day holy. A couple other key things I took out of it were that we should pray and ask the Lord each night what we need to be improving on. Ask what's keeping us from progressing and then listen to the Holy Ghost. It will speak in your mind and your heart and give specific customized answers. I realized the importance of living worthy of a temple recommend and keeping ourselves pure and unspotted from the world. This way we can have the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost. The biggest thing I took away is that we need to be patient and trusting of the Lord. It seems to me that we express our faith by trusting the Lord and trusting that as we do as he says, everything will turn out all right. When we pray, we ask what we can do to better follow Him and align our will with His. Then we listen to his guidance and follow through and trust it will all work out. I'm so grateful for the blessings that come from having modern day prophets and apostles that receive revelation specific to us in our time. Before conference started I had six questions written down referring to what I wanted to learn about during conference. All six questions were answered and a few very specifically. The Lord has not left us alone in these days. He has restored His gospel and called a modern day prophet to lead and guide us and when we adhere to His message, we cannot go astray. 

That's exciting ya'll are reading the Book of Mormon together again! As for why Laman and Lemuel went astray even after seeing an angel, I think of the quote from the Bible dictionary relating to faith: "Miracles do not produce faith, but strong faith is developed by obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ; in other words, faith comes by righteousness, although miracles often confirm one's faith." So even though they saw an angel, which should confirm one's testimony just as much as any miracle would, they weren't being obedient and diligently following Jesus Christ. I think of the verse in the 2nd chapter of James that states "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble." It's not enough to believe in Christ, you must act on that belief. Laman and Lemuel were not acting on that belief, or after the angel appeared, knowledge. If we're not acting and trying to improve ourselves because of our faith what good is it to have faith at all? "Even so faith, if it has not works, is dead..."

It's been raining a ton here. That hurricane brought lots of rain and wind our way. At one point they thought it was going to come through Danville, but we got lucky and it didn't. Because of general conference, an exchange to Eden, and a mission conference, we didn't teach a whole lot last week, but we're looking to get back at it this week!  Love and miss you so much! 

Elder Earnest