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| Rama Alianza Real Mutual Activity Jan 17, 2019 |
Hola!
Wow, this is so incredibly weird to think that five months ago, today (8.21.18) I was an incredibly nervous yet excited missionary about to enter an entirely different life of commitment to my Savior and the beautiful principles of this gospel! I just feel so motivated, and encouraged that now I am entering into the prime time of the mission (at least according to the missionaries here, where I have learned the principles, studied hard, learned through trial and error several practices that are effective and others that are less effective, and now I am able to begin the 6 months to 24 month period where I can also communicate a sentence in Spanish without having to question myself if what I said was grammatically correct! Looking back, there were many moments of frustration and difficulty but I would like to reiterate the words of Elder Holland in his conference talk, An High Priest of Good Things to Come where he shared:
Thirty years ago last month, a little family set out to cross the United States to attend graduate school—no money, an old car, every earthly possession they owned packed into less than half the space of the smallest U-Haul trailer available. Bidding their apprehensive parents farewell, they drove exactly 34 miles up the highway, at which point their beleaguered car erupted.
Pulling off the freeway onto a frontage road, the young father surveyed the steam, matched it with his own, then left his trusting wife and two innocent children—the youngest just three months old—to wait in the car while he walked the three miles or so to the southern Utah metropolis of Kanarraville, population then, I suppose, 65. Some water was secured at the edge of town, and a very kind citizen offered a drive back to the stranded family. The car was attended to and slowly—very slowly—driven back to St. George for inspection—U-Haul trailer and all.
After more than two hours of checking and rechecking, no immediate problem could be detected, so once again the journey was begun. In exactly the same amount of elapsed time at exactly the same location on that highway with exactly the same pyrotechnics from under the hood, the car exploded again. It could not have been 15 feet from the earlier collapse, probably not 5 feet from it! Obviously the most precise laws of automotive physics were at work.
Now feeling more foolish than angry, the chagrined young father once more left his trusting loved ones and started the long walk for help once again. This time the man providing the water said, “Either you or that fellow who looks just like you ought to get a new radiator for that car.” For the second time a kind neighbor offered a lift back to the same automobile and its anxious little occupants. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at the plight of this young family.
“How far have you come?” he said. “Thirty-four miles,” I answered. “How much farther do you have to go?” “Twenty-six hundred miles,” I said. “Well, you might make that trip, and your wife and those two little kiddies might make that trip, but none of you are going to make it in that car.” He proved to be prophetic on all counts.
Just two weeks ago this weekend, I drove by that exact spot where the freeway turnoff leads to a frontage road, just three miles or so west of Kanarraville, Utah. That same beautiful and loyal wife, my dearest friend and greatest supporter for all these years, was curled up asleep in the seat beside me. The two children in the story, and the little brother who later joined them, have long since grown up and served missions, married perfectly, and are now raising children of their own. The automobile we were driving this time was modest but very pleasant and very safe. In fact, except for me and my lovely Pat situated so peacefully at my side, nothing of that moment two weeks ago was even remotely like the distressing circumstances of three decades earlier.
Yet in my mind’s eye, for just an instant, I thought perhaps I saw on that side road an old car with a devoted young wife and two little children making the best of a bad situation there. Just ahead of them I imagined that I saw a young fellow walking toward Kanarraville, with plenty of distance still ahead of him. His shoulders seemed to be slumping a little, the weight of a young father’s fear evident in his pace. In the scriptural phrase his hands did seem to “hang down.”15 In that imaginary instant, I couldn’t help calling out to him: “Don’t give up, boy. Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead—a lot of it—30 years of it now, and still counting. You keep your chin up. It will be all right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come.”
I absolutely love this story that encourages us to keep trying, keep moving forward, even when things look dark and dreary! We always have the Light of the World beckoning us to step forward, improve just a little bit each day, repent willingly and quickly each day of our errors, and we can have the confidence that one beautiful day we will stand before God clean and pure, with the opportunity to live with our families in a state free from pain, death, disappointment, frustration, and everything that comes along with this mortal condition, and hear him calling to us beckoning us into his loving embrace! For this blessing we strive for as missionaries, and we know that it is only through sharing this message that we truly have the capacity to achieve it, because only until all the world has heard this wonderful message and made the decision to accept or reject it, is when the Savior will come, and he will reign in great power and majesty and as my favorite scripture says: He will wipe away all tears from their eyes!
Sorry for not sending a group email the week before, we ran late from the Zone Activity and in returning to our areas we only had time to send the basics, an email to the President and one to our mothers to make sure that they didn´t have a panic attack that something bad happened to us, haha!
I am also a bit low on time today, but here is a picture of mutual from the past week!
I love you guys,
Keep on Swimming and Trusting in our Savior!
Elder Raven
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