Nice digs

Lap of luxury

This has been a great week with Elder Burgoyne! I have loved being a zone leader with him. Best apartment I have ever had! We are both learning, working, and teaching together really smoothly and diligently. We are a lot more busy and deal with all the missionaries a lot. It is more up pace and I love it!

We have an investigator named Felix who is starting to think about baptism!! This area is bigger and wealthier than Novocherkassk. it is really fun. I spoke in front of a congregation 70 or 80 people. It was awesome!

Just resting my eyes. Honest.

The zone is doing well. We just sent out a text about how we want to be studying faith as a zone, especially as regards to finding. We also invited all the other missionaries to share what they are learning and some of the experiences or miracles that have occurred in a result of their faith. We told them that we hope this will inspire us and give us new ideas to work more on our faith. We received several different texts from missionaries expressing how excited they were to do this and that this was something that they have had on their minds! We have a lot of missionaries in our zone that are really enthusiastic about this work.

Novocherkassk friends.

I want to share with you a few things that I have learned while studying faith. I got a lot out of the talk by Elder Bednar entitled Seek Learning by Faith. He mentions three different aspects of faith.

1 Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

2 Lectures on Faith - “(Faith is) the first principle in revealed religion, and the foundation of all righteousness” and that it is also “the principle of action in all intelligent beings.”

Yeah, pretty big pot of orange chicken.

3 Alma 32:21 - And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.

He goes on to describe these three aspects as the first one an element of the future, the second an element of the present, and the third one an element of the past. This can be applied in a lot of our daily lives. I applied it to a fit and healthy life style. We hope on a better looking body, we put on the work in the moment, and some of us get to look back on our hard work and see that the things that we hoped for were true, and through our daily efforts we were able to achieve our goals.

Love you, Novocherkassk branch!

This is the same thing with applying faith in missionary work. We can't do missionary work effectively with skipping any of these steps. We have to have the hope that people are out there, the will to talk with someone even if you are not 100% confident about your Russian, and then you will be able to look back at your efforts and results, and your testimony will be strengthened.

Me, Elder Burgoyne, and
some members.

Those are some of my thoughts on faith, but I have a lot more to learn and I am going to continue studying this topic for a while.

That is fun to hear that Paige is moving out! I hope that will be fun for her. Though, I feel like she will get lonely and be at your place a lot!! haha I will keep praying for her.

Love you guys! Have a good week!

Elder Weston

Rostov