Monday, May 18, 2015

Singapore today for Zone Conference! Hopefully will have some more pictures next week but we already went to Little India this morning and got looking at some dress's for a little special someone who's birthday is in August so be on the lookout in the mail :) 

We have been continuing to hit the gym each morning and the basketball court each night. I have been upping my nightly routine to two 17's at night and also been throwing in 100 100 100 again once a week but I have to start at 70 70 70 again to build up. The pullups are always hard. 

For basketball I have been using a tennis ball a lot (a drill I got with Gabe) and also a lot of Don's Shooting workouts so it has been good. Although I don't have a rebounder so it makes things a little harder. But we make it work. 

I finished the Book of Mormon this week (in English) I read it from a challenge our mission president gave us about reading it and marking up all the references to the doctrine of Christ (faith, repentance, baptism, gift of the Holy Ghost and Enduring to the End.) It was awesome and I would encourage people to take a soft cover of the book of Mormon write a question in the front, read it, mark it up, and then when you finish write in the front cover a summary of the main things that you learned. It is wonderful. I got the idea from a Elder Bednar in the MTC. 

Also, considering the fact that a lot of our current investigators and recent converts and investigators are Indian, I have been picking up a little bit of Tamil. Hopefully soon I can be conversational like I am in Malay but Tamil is way way harder than Malay. 

Susanna! She got baptized this week! She is so so awesome! She calls Elder Lundahl-Wolford and I her sons and wants us to go to the temple with her after we finish our missions! Mom and Dad keep that in mind! I don't know what temple she would want to go to but we will see! She is already saving money to go! Her baptismal service was awesome and I got to confirm her on Sunday morning which was wonderful! She is so so excited about family history as well!

On Sunday I also got the chance to give a talk in Sacrament meeting. I titled my talk "Mom's Atonement." I talked about my Mom a lot since I was assigned to talk on mother's day but I found new insight into what our parents sacrifice for us in relation to what Jesus Christ did for us. 

I realized that Mom pays for our piano lessons, takes us to basketball, football and baseball practices, takes charge of FHE, morning and night family scripture reading and prayers, gives us a house and much much more. And she does it all for free. When Mom gives us this free piano lesson each week she never asks or is ever expecting us to pay her back. We cannot. We will not. But she does ask us one thing. That is to practice. By practicing the piano we aren't paying her back at all but just using the gift she gave us to become what she wants us to become.

The same goes for Jesus Christ. Except the gift is slights bigger, if you can only imagine. It is the price of our sins. We can never ever pay Jesus Christ back. But what he does ask us to do is to practice or in other words Repent. Or use the gift that he gave us. 

A lot of Christian churches ask have you been saved by the Grace of Jesus Christ? And we answer yes of course, thankfully, happily. But I want to ask you the more important question, Have you been changed by grace? 

Have you used Mom's piano lesson and practiced? Have you used Grace and changed? 

Happy Mother's Day last week! Love you Mom! 

A lot of my thoughts from this talk came from a wonderful talk given by Brad Wilcox called "His Grace is Sufficient." I would recommend it to everyone :) Like really please watch it.


Love you all,

Elder Pierce 

Pictures: -2 JB districts doing the JB sign! 
-Susanna's baptism! 

-Little India!

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