This week has a special message for everyone. It is that God is aware of us, individually, as His children. I know what it's like to doubt yourself or doubt that things will go right, but I think that that's when we need to learn to be patient. Sometimes we have to wait to see if our decisions and actions were correct. Sometimes, when we do something we think to be right, we get answered by a trial or a test that just makes us feel like we've screwed things up with bad decisions. But I know that if we have faith and pray for those miracles, God will help us to see through the fog and know that after the trial, after He has given us what we need to overcome it, things will be better than if we hadn't been answered with that test. I have seen that a lot this week, and it's something that feels so edifying, even when we're trying to lift an impossible burden.
So, what was tough about this week?
Well, preparing the documents for this new year and totally new way to report numbers and other such things has proven to be an immense challenge. On top of that, two different houses have to have been closed by the first, but I wasn't able to get things fast enough, so we've been having kind of a housing crunch right over the top of things. This came right at New Year's and has made the proselyting work suffer quite a bit.
The work has been just nuts doing that, and we've come to find that we can get a lot done working together. To sum up what Elder Billings told me once to console me for a terrible week, "There are weeks when the office just kicks your butt," and that is what happened.
But! This is a message of hope! Because, and this is my testimony, when we put it into God's hands and just work assuming that nothing can stand in the way of His work and His glory, miracles happen! We become so much more capable of so many amazing things! But there's an added bonus! When we combine our efforts and work, striving to coordinate ourselves with other people who are also striving to live the Gospel, the miracles multiply and spread. I've seen coincidence fall onto coincidence like dominoes.
I don't want to go into specifics just because the circumstances are difficult and I don't want to seem like I'm complaining, but things that I thought impossible get done in the space of an hour. I love this work and I love to see the hand of God leading us along in doing what's right.
New Year's was nice. We spent it with a family in the Ward here and got to eat some really good Asado (this time it was big chunks of pig with bones and everything). I also cut up a bunch of fruits and made what I believe to be my first fruit salad. NOTE: fruit salad here bears about the same resemblance to fruit salad in the states as actual mythical story of Hercules bears to the Disney cartoon. The stuff down here is suspended in liquid and incredibly messy.
Today was really cool, because after doing a bunch of office work, we went to do some service and helped a Recent Convert here in Campo Grande move out of here house. We loaded everything up into a truck and it felt absolutely great to see her happy face and the happy faces of her children. They are a wonderful little family and I hope that they do well in Luque. We'll miss them.
But, pictures are included!
That's pretty much all I have to say this week. I'm including a picture of the Christmas day singing in I.P.S., where we got to go all the way up to the roof and I got a picture next to the Asunción skyline.
One tradition that I have never ceased to love is that of setting resolutions for the New Year. I think that even if the phrase or the piece of paper we scribbled petty words that try to catch the bulk of our thoughts and interest, a true resolution has so much value. People often look at goals and resolutions (including myself for almost my whole life) as something that'd be nice to achieve or something we want, but I've come to realize that it's not so. It comes from the deepest part of your heart. It's something that appears in spoken prayers and burns in the living prayers we make in our actions and thoughts throughout our days. It is that deep desire that powers us to act above all else. And so, setting a resolution ceases to be writing a goal and trying to remember to keep it. It becomes, rather than something we try to remember, something we have a hard time forgetting.
Therefore, may we set resolutions not by looking ahead at what we want in the future, but evaluating ourselves deep down in our hearts, finding those purest desires for perfection, good, and Godliness, and trying to tie them down with our words. I know that if we master this art of acknowledging, taming, and channeling those deepest desires, we will fulfill our potential and the hopes hold to will not be hollow.
My resolution this year: I want to take the last third of this mission that God has granted me to perfect the art of losing myself and learning to be humble and uplift other people so much more. And I want this year to be the one in which I take those skills home and rather than trying to make myself great, work so hard every minute of every day to help those around me reach their own greatness.
That is what I pray for.
Love,
Elder Harris
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