Monday, July 11, 2016

Teachin' Seminary

Dear family and friends,

This week we got back on track!! After the stupid party of the "Señor de la sangre," which means "Lord of Blood," things were a lot calmer this week. We were able to get to work and find some people and home and meet a lot of new ones.  

I didn´t mention last Monday for the 4th of July, our pensionista made us "hamburgers" and french fries at my request.  The hamburgers here aren´t real hamburgers; they´re thin jerky-like strips of meat with a fried egg.  But still, tasting meat and bread and ketchup and mayonase and tomato all together kinda resembled a hamburger, and made me happy nonetheless.

One fun thing that happened this week is that we taught seminary! Got to put myself in the shoes of my pops haha.  The teacher has some training for recently returned missionaries, which he is, so he asked us to teach.  We taught Numbers 17-21, and it was super fun! I really do like teaching.  I´m not as good at it as I´d like to be yet, but I really enjoy it.  I was flashing back to my year of Old Testament in 9th Grade with Brother Larsen and thinking about my dad teaching seminary all his career, so it was kind of a fun moment.

We found a family of 6 this week, the brother of our recent convert and his family.  They aren´t quite as prepared as their relatives, but they´re super nice and we´re looking forward to visiting them with their recently baptized family members and working a bit more with them!

So I got insanely confused this week reading Mosiah 15, the first few verses.  I´ve read them lots of times, but most of the time I just kinda gave them the Isaiah treatment, if ya know what I mean;)  I decided this week to really dive in and try to understand how Christ is God, the Eternal Father, but is also the Son of God, and how they are really one Eternal God.  I can see why there is so much confusion in the world about it! Today I made some real progress and started to understand better.  Christ gives us life temporally and spiritually, is the creator, is the God of this world and the author of our salvation.  Reading Ephesians 1:3-6 really opened up a new way of thinking too.  I´m not even going to try to say more about it here, and I surely don´t understand it yet, but I would invite anyone who wants to have a fun personal study look a little more into it.  And would also very much appreciate any commentaries from general authorites on the subject!

To finish, I´m gaining a lot more appreciation for the light of Christ.  The scriptures talk about Christ destroying peoples and nations.  I didn´t understand how or why he could do that either, with the charity that he has, but one idea that I had is that maybe he just withdraws that spirit and light and watches in sadness.  The spirit won´t always strive with man! We learn a little bit about what would happen without Christ from Jacob in 2 Nephi 9.  When a people is so wicked that Christ withdraws that spirit and his light, they kinda just destroy themselves.  Sorry for the morbid spiritual thought, but I thought it was interesting.  And that isn´t doctrine either, just my though haha.

Love ya all and hope you have a great week!

Love, Tanner

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