Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Sorry this is late--again! His title for this email was "Chang eats the moon and drinks the sky, and they both go with him when he dies" which is from the show Community. Enjoy!

Hey all,

Cotopaxi was really fun today, really tiring. We got up at 4 to leave, and we got back at 4. It was really fun and really cool, but we never actually got to see the peak. It was super, super cloudy, but that's okay. It was very windy and very cold, but as a true Minnesotan, I handled it fine. We had a snowball fight, which was really fun, some Elders had never touched snow before. It looks like you guys finally got snow, which is awesome. I miss having it white around Christmastime, but that's okay.

We had a pretty tough week this week, but I'm doing okay. We had some situations come up with investigators that made things really tough for us and for them. But, on Sunday, the Lord blessed us with a really great surprise. We have an investigator, Luis Morales, that really wanted to get baptized, but he works almost every day. On Sunday, at 10 a.m., he called his brother who serves in the bishopric, and asked if he could get baptized that morning and confirmed in church that same day. Our sacrament meeting starts at 12. It was super, super crazy, but at the end of the 3 hour block, he was baptized, confirmed, and had the Aaronic Priesthood. It was a really powerful testimony builder to me. We worked hard this week, and as I said, due to a few situations that probably aren't best to talk about openly with many people, we were feeling very down. But we worked really hard and we were very obedient, and the Lord blessed us for the work we put in, our faith, and our desires to really help people come unto Christ. Very cool experience for me, and great way to end the week...

Thank you so much for the package. It turns out that someone did go to the offices, and I have the packages. The surprise of a present kind of disappears when you have to declare what is in the package, but I'll pretend to be surprised when I open them on Christmas. And I knew that you would send the pretzel things, I was gonna ask for them, but I knew that they would come. They are almost gone after 4 days. They taste like Christmas. Thank you so much for the package.

My Batman-plan is coming along well. I did 1500 push ups last week, and have been sneaking out at night to fight people. Okay, so I haven't been sneaking out, but I am doing push ups like mad. I've got a good exercise and diet plan down, and I'm feeling a lot better these days, and feel like I have a lot more energy to work every day. I really miss basketball...

I was thinking a lot about inertia today when we were on Cotopaxi because I am a nerd. As I was thinking about it, I thought about the idea of spiritual inertia. For example, if we're doing good things often, like reading the scriptures and writing Elder Thomas, it's tough to stop ourselves from doing those good things. But, it we're doing bad things, like forgetting to write our brother (Madsens) often, it's also very hard to stop doing those things. Just like walking down a steep hill, it takes a lot of work to impose the force that is pulling us down. It's possible, just hard and takes a force of our own to impose the force of gravity. So we should all do our best to keep our spiritual inertia going in the right direction, and we won't have to worry about trying to oppose a strong force against us.

I love studying the Gospel, love it, love it. Every day, it's like my eyes are opened a bit wider, and I can understand what scriptures are saying so much better. Especially writing the Libro de Mormón in my own words. I really respect Nefi when he gets the instructions to build a boat. A whole boat. If the Lord asked me to do that, I'd be like, good joke, I can't do that. But the Lord says that He will show Nefi how to build it, so all he asks is where he can find the materials to make tools to build a boat. We should be more like Nefi, always willing to do what the Lord asks. We should think more along the lines of, okay, You gave me a commandment, I'll do it, just give me what I need to do it. Go Nefi.

It's about that time. I love you all tons, remeber to tell me when we're going to talk and my Skype information. I love you all tons and tons, and miss you tons, too. Dash, keep it real. Thanks for taking care of him.

Con amor,

Elder Thomas

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