Vacation

Kia ora yall! I hope you guys are doing awesome. I hope this week was fantastic. Mine was alright. Nothing too special. But it's always a good week here in Aotearoa.


Anyways, the work this week was a bit slow. It seemed like we visited every dot in area book and they were either gone or just weren't interested. But, we'll keep going. We also didn't get to work in our area much because we were on vacation in Greymouth. Nah I'm just kidding. We went on exchanges there but it basically felt like a vacation. It was a 4 hour drive down, and then we were there from Monday til Wednesday. It took us 7 hours to get back though because we missed a turn. We were driving and showed up in another town on the west coast called Westport and that's when we realized we had been going the wrong way for an hour. So, we turned around and finally got home after 7 hours. But, I'm not complaining because I like going for a drive and this was possibly the most beautiful drive ever. I'll show some pics. That was about half of the week. The other half we were just doing good ole work here in Nelson.

Alrighty, now for my spiritual thought of the week. Sorry I haven't done one of these for a while. But, this week while I was getting ready to study I sat in my chair at my desk and saw that my Bible was open to Hebrews chapter 12. Not sure how it got there but i just found it like that, so I just read it. And I absolutely loved it. Here's my 2 favorite scriptures from it. 
Hebrews 12: 6, 11
6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth
11 Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.

The Lord loves those that he chastens. In other words, the Lord loves those he corrects. In verse 11 it talks about how as much as it sucks to be corrected and chastised, it is ultimately for our good and we will see improvement in our lives because of it. My companion and I talked about the story of the currant bush. How the bush couldn't grow any fruit. So, it needed to be cut down in order for it to grow again and ultimately provide some fruit. In our lives, sometimes we need to be humbled, corrected, and chastised in order for us to grow into the person our Heavenly Father wants to be. One thing I've always struggled with in my life is taking correction and council from others. One person that knows this the best is my Pops haha. I was the definition of uncoachable growing up. I'm sure all my basketball coaches would agree as well. So, my invitation to you all, is that when you get a feeling of correction from the spirit, make that correction. Take it as an opportunity to improve yourself and your relationship with your heavenly father.

Alright that's all, I love you all and hope you have a good week.

Arohanui Elder Larson


                                                                                our drive to Greymouth





elder Moala and his new hat made out of possum fur

Tongan elders at their weekly Umu🐷


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Ofa pe teke ma'u ha 'aho Sapate Fa'e lelei

Image
Malo e lelei everybody! I hope that you have all had a wonderful week. I hope that each of you wished your mothers a happy mothers day. If you haven't, make sure to go do that now. I would also like to apologize for being terrible at writing emails every week, especially to my mother. It's been a busy few weeks, but they have been awesome. We got to go to the temple again last week. So that meant packing up and driving a van 7 hours up to Hamilton with a bunch of other missionaries. It was super fun, I love a good road trip. I'm so blessed to have gone on a couple temple trips while I've been serving here. It is not to easy to get up there, and it definitely isn't cheap. Each time I go I am reminded of God's Plan of Salvation. One of the things that really stood out to me this time is that when we sacrifice things in our life, it is a similitude to the Savior's sacrifice. Obviously, we can never compare our sacrifices to His ultimate sacrifice, but sacrifice...
Read more

Jonah's baptism

Image
Kia ora everybody!! I hope you all had a great week. This week was very busy for us, but it was also an awesome week. Most of the week we spent just focusing on preparing for the baptism. Other than that, we had some pretty good days of work. We put another one of our friends on date for January 5th. His name is Dante and he's doing really good right now with the discussions. He has a ton of member support from his uncle and he's coming to church heaps. His mother, that is really inactive, came to church for the first time in a year or so. So, that has been really cool to see. I'm loving the area right now because everything is starting to click and we're starting to get things rolling. Anyways, we had Jonahs baptism on Saturday. That was an awesome experience. The spirit was so strong and heaps of people came to it as well. His entire family is either inactive or nonmembers, and they all came to the baptism. It was good for them to be there and I hope they were able to...
Read more

Scabies and hospital trips

Image
Kia ora everybody!! I hope you have all had a fantastic couple of weeks. To be completely honest mine haven't been. But that's alright. Anyways, not much to report on for these last 2 weeks, unfortunately. So, me and my companion and the other elders in our flat were put in quarantine all of last week, along with other companionships in the zone. I was exposed to a bug called Scabies, you may have heard the name. I actually was infested by the bug. I had bites all over my back and arms. It really isn't that harmful of a bug, just feels like mosquito bites. But, it's pretty serious because it can spread really easily. So, we had to coop ourselves up in our flat for a whole week. We had to deep clean everything to help get rid of it. Other than that, we did nothing but sit around the flat and play card games. Safe to say we were all a little depressed, but we made it out. We got out of quarantine this last Monday and I was excited to just get out of the house and do some ...
Read more