Lots of Study Time

Hey!

Wow sounds like everyone had a fun Thanksgiving! I'm glad everything went well! And thanks Elder Webster 2 for all the pictures! San Francisco looks way fun!

We had another typical week in the office. Nothing too out of the ordinary. The next two weeks are full of conferences that we have to prepare for and then right after that we have to have the christmas party ready, so thats keeping us busy enough. Haha and yes, my piano playing is coming along pretty well-ish. I found a book of like 50 "simplified hymns" and I can pretty much play all of those now, so thats pretty cool. I've only really been practicing with my right hand though because, well, I wouldn't want to be too good at piano or else that would take all the fun out of it haha or something like that. I helped Elder Trelease pay rent for his first time so that was...about how you might imagine. We haven't quite finished, but we've gotten most of it ready for the beginning of the month. Plus, we talked with President and got the amount raised that all the missionaries receive every month for food and stuff, so that was different. More than anything I think I've just been helping Elder Trelease with things and daydreaming a little bit about when I'm going to get out of the office...

We got to go out to work a few times this week. All of our appointments with Mario keep falling through. When we call him he's always way happy to talk to us, but he works pretty much all-day, every-day, so he's been really hard to get a hold of. He agreed to come meet us on sunday at the church though, so hopefully that works out. Elder Trelease and I have also taken up a new game while we're out. We work in one of the richest parts of the mission, so we've kind of set the goal of finding the nicest houses we can and then knocking on their door. Haha it didn't really start out that way, we would just go, and anytime one of us said something about the way a house looked, we'd go over to knock on the door. We're also thinking about trying to bring a giant whiteboard or something over to this walking path near the office, and then writing a question on it or something to start conversations with the people at the park/walking path, because there are always a ton of people there. We'll see.

As far as verse of the week, it was a hard choice this week. Training in the office means I have lots of study time, and this week I've been having some of the best personal studies I've had in a long time. This isn't necessarily my favorite thing I learned this week, but I decided it would probably be the easiest to put into words, so here it is: 1 Nephi 17:12. Pretty simple. Nephi was explaining that they hadn't really made very many fires on their journey because the Lord had promised that he would take care of their food. But that made me wonder.....why? Would it really have been that hard for Lehi's family to make a fire that they were in need of that type of miracle? Surely living in the desert didn't involve so many time consuming tasks that they didn't even have time to make fire..? So then I started imagining what that would have been like. Every meal would have been a trial of faith...looking at the meat they were going to eat, knowing it hadn't been cooked...and then eating it, trusting that the Lord had taken care of it. It kind of gave meaning to verse 13 where it says that they would know who it was that was leading them on their journey. It would have been hard to deny the Lord's hand when literally every meal was a obvious reminder of the miracles He was doing to help them. Not to mention it would have been pretty humbling knowing that the Lord cared enough to basically cook your food for you. Kind of interesting how, in a way, the blessing wasn't so much a physical thing, but a spiritual thing that helped their faith and humility.

Well, I hope you all have a great week this week! And I'm glad you all had a great Thanksgiving!!

Elder Webster