In The Great Wide Somewhere: 07/31/17

Me and Chloe <3

"Confide In God Unwaveringly

and Let him Us Sustain.

Sing his Glory Endlessly

For Later He'll Explain"

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This week Johnny and I did a ton of family history

Found out Johnny super enjoyed church

Found out Rhoda super enjoyed church

and this last Sunday (yesterday)

Curtis and Rachel came, and we have wedding plans set in motion for this Saturday!

We are all sorts of EXCITED as the big day approaches, and they make cute promises to each other, and then next week Curtis will make promises with God through the covenant of baptism.

My heart is so happy for so many reasons!

-MyPlan-

myplan is the going home version of the first 12 weeks of a missionary

12 week is to help you adjust into misisonary life, and "MyPlan" is to help you adjust out of missionary life into member missionary life

well here are some interesting things

-they make you watch adorable videos of cute maried couples and their newborn baby

-you make goals and set plans for after the mission

-you sign up for Institute (literally I enrolled in Institute last week... I will be taking classes from Brother Muellers dad at Weber State, Brother Mueller the sr kind, and that is a treat because the jr kind was my Seminary teacher my senior year of high school and he's awesome!

Hope that's not confusing)

Anyway I started off with a really bad attitude about MyPlan because my actual plan was to not plan until the day before I went home.

Well apparently God has other plans, and that is to make myplan HisPlan and I am more than okay with that now. I feel like the transition will be a lot better because of this inspired six weeks of "MyPlan"

some other things about the week

Diane did fabulous in her new calling as chorister, and she was asked to bear her testimony because it was Branch Conference yesterday. She did so well.

She also LOVES the Pero, and you mom.

I got bit by a spider on my face, it's huge, the bite I mean. No worries, it's healing and no accounts of doctors or shots in places you don't want to get shots in have to be mentioned, because there were none.

Thank goodness.

Spiders in the South

-saw a church sign that says "five loaves and two fish, the first Happy Meal"

-Mary and Von from crestview came to visit for a minute <3

Mary & Von from Crestview came for a quick visit <3

-I learned a lot about humility, and the importance of loving ourselves in the right way as God loves us.

I am building on the simple things that I have already learned and felt and I love it

I've said it before and will say it again

I am convinced that we would love even the vilest of human beings if we had the time to get to know them and learn all about their life story...

that is one of the reasons Jesus Christ loves us all so perfectly, because He knows us perfectly. So we cannot in turn expect to love others perfectly, without knowing them. At least without His help we can't

That can be hard when we only have a few weeks with them or a few months as a missionary, especially because we are to love everyone instantly and see them for their potential, the great thing is that we are set apart as special representatives of Jesus Christ, He has promised us His spirit to help us feel for others how He feels for them.

We must also be in tune with the Spirit in order to know how He feels about us.

here is an interesting thought

We cannot perfectly know ourselves in this life.

So we cannot justly feel dislike about ourselves, we cannot have self hatred, it just doesn't have any merit, because we do not know ourselves perfectly.

It is a waste of time, because we don't even know ourselves well enough to know if we do or do not love ourselves.

If we were to meet a stranger, and decide after only a few hours whether or not we will love them, it would be wrong.

In the grand scheme of things, this life is but a few hours. Maybe a few minutes. So we must not decide against loving ourselves, we must pray and have faith that we can love ourselves because of Him.

The veil has hidden a lot about us that we don't remember, we are also not ourselves without an eternal companion because man is not without the woman neither is the woman without the man

therefore there is no way to know ourselves perfectly in this life

but we can have faith in Jesus Christ, that He does know who we were before this life, He does know all about our current lives, our upbringing, our personality, weaknesses, strengths, EVERYTHING so we can feel His love for us, and that can help us to love ourselves as He would have us do so.

We are not our own, we are temples of God, He created us, He loves us. That is where our worth comes from, not from mankind, not from worldly things, or praise, or even our own vain approval of ourselves. Without God we are nothing.

But we are everything to the Savior. All we have to give Him is our will, and even our very ability to make a choice to give Him our will, that thing we use to make the choice called agency, was a gift from God.

pride comes in a number of ways, it is thinking more of ourselves in an incorrect way, or thinking less of ourselves instead of thinking about how He thinks of us. Self pity, and self hatred, is not humility. It is pride from the adversary that tells us that we have control over our self worth.

When we punish ourselves instead of forgiving ourselves, it is pride. We do not need to satisfy the demands of justice, those demands were satisfied long ago so that we wouldn't have to.

I have learned that my worth has little to do with me, but everything to do with who made me. Which makes me of infinite worth and value.

It is He who gave me my talents, knowledge, and faith. Faith, even, is a gift from God.

Everything that is incredible, amazing, and wonderful about me, comes from someone else. My Father in Heaven, and my brother Jesus Christ who enables me to be all of those things.

I owe everything to my Father in Heaven, to my brother Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son in the flesh, the redeemer of the world.