Semana 59

Dear Elder Lutze, 

We pray for your continued success in Panama! Keep up the great work! Stake Conference this weekend was amazing! I was  so we all watched through the links from home! Lots of great thoughts about “just keep moving forward!” McKinley spoke about Trek. He spoke about the saints from the Martin Handcart Company and how the Lord knows (He prepared the cove for them), He shouldered their burdens and made them light, and it was worth the price they paid to know Christ! Thoughts on this in relation to your mission?

This week was mostly work at work and home - prepping the yard for winter. I did get my haircut and went to a YWs pumpkin  painting activity. Rachael is in the middle of interviews and Foster too. Hannah is busy with the boys especially this week while Foster is on his hunting trip. Pray gets an elk early so he can come home early. Natalie is working and enjoying Haunted Houses.

Love you! 

Mom

A few thoughts I came across this week!

Galatians 2:20

Elder Robert L. Backman of the Seventy explained that it is through total surrender to the Savior that we find the new life He has for us: “What Christ desires from each of us is surrender, complete and total—a voluntary gift of trust, faith, and love. C. S. Lewis captured the spirit of this surrender: “‘Christ says, “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. … Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”’ (Mere Christianity, New York: Collier Books, 1960, p. 167)” (“Jesus the Christ,” Ensign, Nov. 1991, 10). 20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Galatians 3:24-29

Elder Paul V. Johnson of the Seventy taught that the problem Paul addressed in Galatians teaches us about the importance of accepting changes the Lord makes in His kingdom: “Our willingness to accept change in the kingdom helps the Lord hasten His work (see D&C 88:73). Resistance to inspired change hinders progress of the kingdom. For example, in the last half of the New Testament a major challenge the Church faced was the issue of gentile converts being assimilated as Christians. This issue surfaces in the book of Acts and is a theme in many of Paul’s epistles. The problem stemmed from the fact that many Jewish Christians felt that gentile converts should be required to adhere to the ceremonial law of Moses. Even Peter’s dramatic revelation in the case of Cornelius, that the gospel should be taught to the Gentiles (see Acts 10–11), did not wipe the slate clean. And even after a special council in Jerusalem decided that the gentile converts need not be subject to the law and an epistle was written explaining this decision, the issue remained a source of contention and division (see Acts 15). This was a major change for the Church, and many members struggled with it. “… Many Jews, and even Jewish Christians, … had lost sight of the intent and proper position of the law. One reason for this was the unauthorized addition of requirements and traditions around the law that helped obscure its real intent. These additions and traditions were no longer a ‘schoolmaster … unto Christ’ (Galatians 3:24), ‘pointing our souls to him’ (Jacob 4:5), but rather were so burdensome and consuming that many Jews looked ‘beyond the mark’ (Jacob 4:14) and put the perverted law in place of the Lawgiver Himself. … “… I hope when we face change in the kingdom we can be like Paul and help foster that change rather than reacting like those who fought the change and hindered the progress of the work” (“Responding Appropriately to Change” [address to CES religious educators, Feb. 8, 2013], 1).