So this week has been so much better than the last week. The people have been a lot less difficult and also I think my attitude has been better. I don't know what the deal was the week before. Oh and also I had the opportunity to learn from and meet an apostle of the Lord which was pretty great too.
I know you guys are all dying to hear about that so that is what I am going to focus on this week. So Friday was the day that we got to hear from Elder Bednar. All of the missionaries in the mission got together to hear him which was really cool because they never do that. Usually when we have meetings we do them in three groups so it was cool to get to see the whole mission. First we got to take a picture with him, which I will send when we get them, and then we got to basically sit and chat with him for the next two and a half hours.
We talked a lot about faith and action and how the two are connected. This applies to everything we do that has to do with faith. If we want to pray with faith we have to be willing to 1. Do everything in our power afterward to make our prayers come to pass and 2. We have to be willing to act on those answers. One example we talked about is that if we want less actives to come to church, praying for them to make it isn't enough, we need to be willing to go out and find the less actives and bring them. When we do this we are praying and acting with faith. When we do this the Lord will then bless us with the power and ability to know what to do and how to do it. This is something I have really been working on as a missionary. It is really to ask Heavenly Father to help us get more investigators but it is another thing for us to ask Him what we need to do to find them and then go out and work all day talking to every person we meet and then following the spirit while we are out. However as my companion and I have been working to apply this it has been amazing to see how much more success we have had.
Another thing that was really cool about the conference was how Elder Bednar set it up. It was not like at other meetings where the person gets up there and speaks and then the rest just listen but rather we were invited to prepare by reading some talks and then we had more of a discussion. He basically asked us what we learned, how we could apply it, and how it had helped us. We would answer and then we would talk a little bit about that reply. It was really cool to see how the spirit was there so strongly and how we learned. One thing I got out of it was how important preparation is both for the teacher and the learner. As a teacher, the spirit can't bring things to your remembrance if you haven't studied them and as a learner it is so much easier to learn if you already have a foundation about the topic. As we prepare we can better teach by the spirit and learn by the spirit.
Anyway, we finished the meeting by getting to shake his hand. I feel so blessed to have already gotten the chance to meet two apostles on my mission. I am also now even more excited for conference and to learn from all of the brethren.
I love you all, have a great week!
Love,
Hermana Carpenter
p.s. Grandma, this is for you. Yes I have had the opportunity to play the piano a lot. I have already played for two different musical numbers, at various meetings, and I play almost every week in church!
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