Week 47, June 19, 2017

This has been an amazing week. We have met with a lot of people and have done a lot of work. We have seen people work to change their lives so that they can come closer to Jesus Christ. I love being a missionary. But I need to talk about something that happened to me that totally rocked my world and changed the way I see things. So I need to talk about Prayer. Sometimes even as members we don't fully understand the power of prayer. Even when we have been praying for almost our entire lives we sometimes miss out or forget what a blessing prayer is. It is a miraculous gift from our Father in Heaven. It can change our lives. Just think, for those of us that are members of the LDS church our entire religion started with a prayer. It is AMAZING to feel the power that prayer has in our lives. I must confess I did not learn this by watching someone else pray. Instead I learned it in what is probably a much harder way. You see even as a missionary I have bad days. Some days are really hard and I end up feeling pretty lousy. Not to say there aren't amazing days where I feel the spirit extremely powerfully, but often there are days where things seem really hard and I kinda want to give up. And Saturday was one of those days. I just did not have a good day. Things did not go well, I felt like I was wasting my time, that nothing I did mattered, and that I might as well give up. But that is why prayer is such a wonderful thing. The Lord does not want us to ignore those feelings. He doesn't want us to pretend to be perfect and never worry. He wants us to instead take those feelings and turn them over to him. To tell him how we are feeling and let the Atonement of Jesus Christ work in our lives and erase that pain that we feel. And so that is what I did. I knelt down and I just prayed. I told God all of it. All the pain, the disappointment, the feelings of inadequacy, the feelings like I could not do this, that I didn't make a difference anyway. I told him every single thing. And guess what? Nothing "miraculous" happened. I didn't see angles, the prophet didn't appear at my doorway, and quite frankly I don't think anyone besides God even noticed let alone cared. But that's the amazing thing. I felt peace. Not that my problems disappeared. They are still there. But I just felt as though I knew that God loved me. That He was listening. And that I could do this. I could keep going and doing what I needed to do to help others come unto Christ and feel that same love. That is what is so stupendous and wonderful about the Gospel and more importantly about our God. He is not some aloof being that doesn't care what happens to us. He is our Father in Heaven. He knows us so individually and watches over us constantly. He is always there. And He so desperately wants to help us through our trials. We just don't let him when we refuse to pray. When we turn away from him. And trust me all of us need his help. There is not a single way we can get through life without God's divine assistance. We are all too weak and helpless to try and make it on our own. We NEED God. I NEED God. And He is always there for us. We just have to reach out and bring him in. I love this gospel for that reason. It brings God into my life. It allows me to feel his love for me. It allows me to make sacred promises to my Heavenly Father which have blessed my life so much! I cannot tell you how much this means to me. I usually don't express it very well. But this gospel means the world to me. It means so much to know who I am, where I came from, and where I am going. To know that once again God speaks to man through his servant the prophet. That there is a prophet on earth today whose name is Thomas S Monson. To know that this is Christ's church RESTORED to the earth. I love that. I love my Savior Jesus Christ. I love my God. I love this church. But to close it all out I want each of you to know I love you. That you are a child of God with infinite worth and even more than that You are my friends and I love you. You are amazing and have always inspired me to be better. Thank you all so much. I love you. Yours truly Elder Nathan Lindh