Toenails, Baptisms, And Miracles!

Good morning everyone! Wow, I don't even know where to get started this week! This week was tough, rewarding, and absolutely crazy! Let's get right into it!


SPIRITUAL THOUGHT


Saturday and Sunday, we had the opportunity to listen to General Conference (A giant broadcast where we can listen to the words of our prophets and apostles). It was so amazing!


There were so many fantastic messages, but I'll talk about one that I really liked. Elder Corbitt gave the answer to one of the lifelong questions: "Why did Jesus have to die?" I have honestly thought about that question millions of times in my life. God has all of the poewr in the world, so why did He have to give up his Son to prepare a plan for us? 


He starts off by bringing up two obstacles that we have in this life: physical death and spiritual death. Physical death is the separation of body and spirit after we die. Spiritual death is the separation of our spirits and God that we experienced when we came to Earth. Our ultimate goal on this Earth is to overcome both physical and spiritual death. Otherwise known as be resurrected and enter into God's presence. 


According to this talk, God has power to forgive us of our sins and help us overcome spiritual death. I believe that even if we didn't have Jesus Christ, there would be a way to overcome this death. The only problem is overcoming physical death. Jesus Christ came to the earth, suffered, died on the cross, and was resurrection, so that we can be resurrected too. Thanks to Jesus Christ, everyone will be resurrected!


But I was thinking about this talk and about how God could literally just resurrect us if he wanted to. Couldn't God, with all of His power, just do everything? But then I thought about the other half of Christ's sacrifice: the suffering in the Garden of Gethsamine. It was here that Jesus Christ bled from every pore and experienced everything that anyone could experience. 


I beleive that God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to the Earth to be our advocate. So that when the final day of judgement arrives, we can have someone how knows and experienced our side of the story. We can have a fair judgement and overcome Spiritual death through the advocate himself, Jesus Christ. 


HIGHLIGHTS 


- absolutely exhausted: So my comp got a few ingrown toenails this week and my out of commission for two days. The only problem (this wasn't really a problem) was that we had many people progressing in our area and we needed to follow up with them everyday. So instead of staying in my apartment and taking care of my companion, I did two exchanges with two different zone leaders. But this always meant that we had to take care of both my area and their area. This meant over 15 miles of walking. On top of that, I also had to teach an english class, lead a ward council, and call everyone in my district in the same night. I got to my apartment afterwards (a tad bit late) and just collapsed on the ground. I was dead tired. 


- great miracle: Okay so the next day, I had to take my companion back to the hospital to get his toes checked out. When he finished, I got the prompting to, jokingly, ask the lady if she can check out my toenails too. I showed her my feet and her mouth got wide. I had three giant ingrown toenails and had to get surgery in that very moment. Most painful moment of my life! Turns out that I've been walking on these ingrown toenails more months and one of them was nearing the last stage meaning I was close to having blood poisoning. Yikes. I guess this is one miracle that may have saved my mission. Only problem, I'll be walking up mountains and jungles for the next week in flip-flops, but the grind doesn't stop!


- Baptisms: This past Saturday, I had the priveldge of baptizing three friends that we've been working with and teaching for a couple of weeks now! It was such an amazing spiritual experience! Gabriel, Milton, and Mateus are officially the purest and cleanest people in Brazil and their smiles said it all! I am so grateful that God gave me this opportunity to be an instrument in His hands and help His children make their first covenants with Him. 


- Elder Vaclaw: Had an amazing exchange with Elder Vaclaw on Tuesday! This man is a stud and we worked our tails off. He always brings the energy and was definitely giving me the energy that I was lacking that day! 


- General Confernece was so amazing!! So if you haven't watched it, please watch it. If you don't know where to find it, look up general conference on youtube and I'm sure you'll find it. 


That's it for this week!! Love you all and have the best week ever! Oh yeah and have a Happy Easter this Sunday!


Elder Ware


1) Milton's baptism!
2) started to rain and our path started to turn into a river
3) Exchange with Elder Vaclaw
4) Mateus's baptism
5) old abandoned catholic church
6) straight up pain
7) Gabriel's baptism
8) called up my trainer
9) thought this picture looked cool








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