Week 28 -- April 20, 2020

April 20, 2020

Facebook Live and the Sound of Rain

Hola hola!!!

Those two things in my subject line are the most eventful parts of my week

It was still a great week! Just uneventful, almost every single one of our appointments fell through, which is disappointing when it is your only plan for the whole day, but it's all good, we found ways to fill our time with other "productive" things!

Here's some productive things I did this week:

1. Do the math to figure out that based on 6 generations back on both sides of my family, the average age of death is 75 years

2. Spend too many hours solving and taking too many photos of one Rubix cube and using the default gallery app to combine unto too many collages of 4 to make a HLJ (CTR) logo and a picture of Christ that really looks good if you squint and use some imagination!

3. Made some awesome Shrimp pasta

4. Made myself a mask

So yeah, those are some of my proudest achievements

🤙

3 nights a week, we have a Facebook live with the whole mission, and 2 missionaries share a miracle they've experienced during this quarantine. Well we had the awesome opportunity to do it this last Wednesday. We talked about our amiga Elena who's beyond excited to be baptized, and then shared a message about Joseph Smith. I invite all of you to think about and read Doctrine and Covenants 121!! It went well but after listening to it, I realised how gringo I still am, so that was some good motivation to start grinding on mis estudios!!

I have never been a massive fan of the rain. Back home, every once in a while, I enjoyed sitting on my front porch watching the rainstorm with my mom, but other than that, and the fact that it fills up the lakes to go boating in the summer, I've never been too excited about the rain. ESPECIALLY for the first 3 months of the mission where I saw the sun less than 10 times, and would just rain and be cold all day everyday.

This week, it has been raining a lot here, probably 5 out of the last 7 days it's rained all day. For some reason however, I have LOVED IT!! I wake up to the most beautiful sound of the soft rain outside my window. As I'm studying I turn my music off and just enjoy the sound. Instead of just sitting inside I open up the windows and just let the smell of rainfall enter into our home. I have found myself waking up hoping for rain and thanking God each day we've had it. I didn't even realise how my perspective had completely flipped until yesterday, and then I didn't even know why it had!

After thinking a little bit about it and just brushing it off, I was talking to someone on Facebook who's struggling, and I was giving them some advice and I was sharing the message our Prophet has given us, something like, "Rarely the amount of happiness someone has depends on their circumstances, but a whole lot more on their focus" Right after I said that, it clicked, my focus had changed, even without me noticing, and something that I had really not liked very much, now became something I looked forward to every day and enjoyed every second of!

I have been praying for help to better my attitude and perspective of this quarantine. The rain is the same thing as the quarantine or whatever other problem is in your life right now. Did the rain change? Did anything about it change? No, rain is still rain, but what's the difference? It's what I'm looking for, and the change of perspective.

If you truly look for the good in everything going on, I promise your perspective will change and you will start to enjoy the amazing blessings God has given us!!

Have an amazing week!!

-Élder Boden

Pictures:

1-2. Too many hours of work