Dear Dad,
I thank you as always for your emails and counsel. I love
the things you said in your last email regarding deep doctrine:
learning how to be with our families in the celestial kingdom is the real deep
doctrine. Learning how to have the Atonement in our lives. Learning how to
understand the teachings of the Savior. I'm trying to do better and improve in
those aspects of my own life.
I love your words about our relationship with our God and our
Savior. We keep the covenants because we promised Them we would. We owe everything to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, and as a token of our gratitude, we keep these sacred covenants. And
for this reason we must always try to keep these covenants, we must always show
them the love we have for them, a love that pales in comparison to the love
they have for us. We must always humble ourselves to change, to be better then
we were the day, week, month, and year before. We must always have faith in
Christ, that through Him and His Atonement we can receive the Grace to become
different, to be different people with different desires and different
perspectives.
This week I went to the mission offices with my companion to have
practices with the mission president. The focus of these practices was changing
the way we teach the second lesson in Preach My Gospel, The Plan of Salvation.
One thing our President wants us to change is to not spend so much time talking about our Premortal Life or our life after mortality, but to have the focus of the lesson be the
Atonement. In Preach My Gospel, the Atonement is the longest portion of chapter
2 and it is the Atonement that makes the Plan of Salvation a literal Plan of
Salvation. Without the Atonement we have no hope for great things after this
life.
Our president also wants us to start inviting people to be baptized after
we talk about the Atonement, instead of at the end of the lesson I was very
grateful to take part in the practices and to see the power that this new way
of teaching can have. I'm grateful for the opportunity I have to testify of the
power of the Atonement and the significance it has in all of our lives.
This week we visited a man we had started teaching
earlier in the month. He was really strong and really excited about the gospel
and wanted to baptized when we first started teaching him. The problem was he was
living with his girlfriend and their little girl and his girlfriend didn't want
to get married or baptized. We tried very hard to teach her but eventually we
determined they wouldn't be able to get baptized this month.
When we saw him
this week though, he tearfully told us that his girlfriend left in the middle
of the day while he was at work and took their little girl and all of his
things with her. He didn't have any information: he has no idea where they went. He has
a feeling they went back to their home in another major city in Peru. He told
us though that he doesn't always understand the things that happen in his life,
but the one thing he does understand is that he needs to get baptized. After
passing a interview with our Zone leaders it was determined that he would be
able to be baptized. It was very exciting news. I'm grateful I get to see
someone who has a true desire to follow the gospel. He plans on tracking down
his daughter when he gets more money, because at the moment he has none, and he
hopes one day she can be baptized as well.
As always, Dad, I hope you are doing well. I love you and miss
you every day. I hope you have a great week. If you get a chance,
watch City's champions league game and let me know how it goes. William says they
are looking lethal right now. Give Lucky lots of love for me. Again, I love you
and miss you and cant wait to see you, Mom, Sam and Naomi again. Have an
excellent week.
Love,
Elder McMurray
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