Letter from 9/18/14

Chilling doing Laundry

Jensen Family....

Hi everyone!  I miss you guys and I am glad you have been emailing me!  This last week has been a super long and hard week, and I feel like I am worn thin.  It has been a super good, spiritual week, but a trying week still.  I am glad it is my P-day and that I can get a little rest.

We lost another elder this week.  It is the second elder we have lost since the MTC started.  Elder C went home but I have faith that once he feels better he will be back out there.  Our district is now the smallest district in the West MTC, with seven Elders total.  We picked up Elder N (Elder C's companion) in our (me and Elder H's) companionship, and he is awesome.  Having three companions is cool because I can always have 2 people to talk to.

I am going to miss the Fort Collins snow!  It is 70 here and I will be headed into summer in Argentina.  So, from here on out it is going to be super hot for me until like June!  I will endure it fine though.

On Tuesday we heard from an apostle:  Richard G. Scott.  I was astonished by how in tune with the Spirit he was.  I was also very astounded with how normal he was.  He had doubts about being a missionary too and he was very scared.  But now he is an apostle of the Lord and has been a faithful servant for 20 years.  He told us that the mission was the thing in his life that changed him for the better.  I hope my character becomes great and I become a man of faith and action.

This week we started teaching a new investigator and he gets me super discouraged.  He is supposed to be pushing how good our teaching is and giving us hard questions to answer so we can get better at teaching in the field but he speaks super fast and it can be super hard to understand.  Yesterday  was answering a question about trials and about why bad things happen to good people.  I said that I didn't know why we have trials but I do know that if we endure the well, we will be rewarded.  I asked him to then read D&C 121: 7-8, which talks about how our trials will be but a short moment eternally.  My companion asked him what the verse meant to him and he thought about it for awhile and then told us that he got that "God was going to kill our enemies"!  We told him that was wrong and had to spend the rest of the lesson explaining why killing is wrong.

He is annoying and I don't want to teach him anymore.  That being said, a thing that I need to work on is loving my investigators -- so maybe God wants me to learn how to love someone I don't really love or like at all.

Well, I'm gonna catch a nap before class.  Keep up the good work Jensens!

Love.

Elder Matt Jensen