"An Instrument in His Hands"

Hello everybody!

This week... What a week! We've seen lots of miracles from following what God wants us to do. We've been able to help a lot of people who we wouldn't have been able to help if it weren't for us trying to do God's will.

For example, we were out biking on Tuesday. It had been a pretty slow day - we'd been out all afternoon trying to visit members, some of the people we'd talked to in previous months, and just talking to everybody who we saw and trying to teach them. It was CRAZY hot and we were sweating buckets, until it started pouring buckets. That cooled us off pretty quick. Florida weather... 13 months and I'm still not used to it. Anyway, we had dinner and then headed off to the neighborhood where our bishop lives. We asked him to pray that we'd be able to find somebody that night, and he did. At this point, we're just really hoping that we can find somebody and have a miracle, since we haven't seen anything all day.

We prayed and decided to go to an apartment complex right next to where we live. We have a few members who live there that we decided to visit and see if there were people there we could teach. We get there and... it's gated, so we can't get in. We're about to leave, but Elder Butterfield (the best new missionary on the planet) notices a little gate that the maintenance people go in and out of, and it's open! So we squeeze through and go to visit a member who hasn't been to church in a while. We're both new to the area, and don't know where he lives, so we struggled to find the apartment for just a minute. As we're looking, we hear some shouts, then a door slam, then some angry stomping down the stairs that I know too well from my teenage years. 

We continue walking and come across this lady, sitting on a set of steps, with her legs tucked in close and her head on her knees. We say "hello" and startle her a little, but introduce ourselves and how our message blesses, builds, binds, and strengthens families. She narrates to us the fight that she just had with her husband and declares that we've been sent to her from God (Spoiler alert - she's right.) So we teach her and halfway through, her husband comes out and sits down as well. We teach both of them the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how it blesses families and set a time to come back. It was a beautiful example of how God uses flawed mortal people like us to reach out and uplift his children. It's the best feeling in the world. In the Church it's referred to as being an "instrument in God's hand." In the scriptures it's referred to as being "a polished shaft in [God's] quiver." I think that those are both beautiful descriptions of how we should try to live - as tools in God's hands to do his work!

So this week's poem will be "An Instrument in His Hands". 

Our lives are full of chances,

Appointments to bless lives,

Let's choose well or they'll vanish,

For service we must strive.

A hundred times each hour,

He puts them in our way,

He guides us by his power,

To those who've gone astray.

We hang our lives on "our will",

It's true for all mankind,

But lose your life for His sake,

Then your life you will find.

An instrument in God's hands,

Is what we want to be.

Let's tune ourselves to his will,

And play his melody.

I love you all so much - I hope that everybody is having a great end to their summer before school starts! Enjoy it and go uplift somebody every day!