Dear Family,
I'm glad to hear that Warren and Mel had a good experience with the baby blessing. That sounds like it was a fun experience.
Well another week has gone by in Laredo, without too many crazy experiences during the course of the week. The one story that I can think from this week that was pretty interesting was when we contacted a man named Frank. He used to be in the Air Force but now lives more of a quiet life at home with his family. We contacted him and he invited us in. We got to talking to him a little bit, and he expressed a lot of doubts about religious topics. He believes in God, but has trouble accepting Jesus Christ as the Savior and Son of God because there are so many different opinions about Him. He also threw out some other random doubts and questions that people have about God, like where does He come from, why He permits suffering and so forth.
I didn't feel like any of the questions were legitimate doubts of his, more just questions that he uses to push God out of his mind. Keep in mind these are all questions that we as Latter-Day Saints have answers to, but I didn't really feel like he was in the position to understand and accept them. Anyway, this process of asking him questions went on for a little while, but I didn't really feel like it was going anywhere. Finally he threw out another question. "How come God didn't talk to the Native Americans? They were here too when the Bible was being written!" My companion and I just looked at each other, smiled and then pulled out our copies of the Book of Mormon. We spent a while explaining to him its history and what it teaches. It seemed to arouse some interest in him. It was a cool experience just to see how the Book of Mormon really does answer so many questions that people have. All we have to do is read and study to find them.
The other experience I guess I had this week was a change in my prayers. These past few weeks have been a time of a lot of progress for me. I've learned a good deal about missionary work, but I still have a lot of things yet to discover, I'm sure. Basically, I've spent the time here trying to change myself into the missionary I want to be. I've wanted to be more spiritual, motivated, successful, hardworking, and other things of that sort. Although these things are good goals, I realized that I shouldn't be trying to become what I want to be. I should be trying to be what the Lord wants me to be and what the people of Texas need me to be. I hope that they're the same as they goals I have. Just shifting my perspective has helped me focus a lot on becoming a better servant, and not trying to just serve myself. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I guess I'll just hope it did.
I hope everyone has a great week and hopefully, I'll have some more stories to tell on Monday.
Thanks for sending the packages, Mom.
Love,
Elder Wood
