August 19, 2013

Cher famille,

Yes things are going well as usual. We have been continuing to work hard to help everybody in toulouse. If you remember a few weeks back I talked about teaching an unexpected lesson to a members nephew. We have continued to work with him and things are going along great. Yesterday I sat by him in a particularly long and sleep inducing sacrament meeting. I noticed that he had his phone out and glanced over expecting to see him texting, only to see that he was taking notes about the talks. Even an extremely long one about being a daughter of God. What a stud! 

 

So there have been like 5 or 6 moves in and out of the ward these past few weeks. We helped with a 2 of them this week. Its sad to see some cool families move but we gained a couple of cool families as well. We visited one of the new families yesterday. They are awesome and the playing with the kids while dinner cooked reminded me of all of the family back home. I love and miss you guys! Any way because they are in a new ville they don't know many people and the kids were talking about how they weren't looking forward to starting in a new school here in a week with new teachers and kids that they don't know. We decided to share a story from Mark 5 with them. 

In the story there is a man who comes up to Christ telling Him that his daughter is sick and needs a blessing. While they are returning to the mans home, some men come and tell the man that his daughter had passed away and were giving him a hard time for wasting Christs time. Ignoring the other men Christ tells the man, "Fear not, only believe". Afterwards He goes with the man and raises his daughter from the dead. We shared this story with them and talked about how if we have faith and trust in the Lord that we have no reason to be scared of what is to come. With Christ all things are possible and He will always help us during difficult times.

In life there will always be hard times that are filled with opposition. Not only was this man stressed about the well being of his daughter but he was surrounded by the opposition and unbelief of those around him. But he didn't heed any of that. Instead he trusted in Christ and because of his faith his daughter was healed. We should follow this mans example. The next time that we are find ourselves in a frightening or stressful situation all we need to do is remember the words of the Savior. We have no reason to fear because we know that we are never alone. If we remember the fact that God is there for us and wont let anything happen to us save it be for our good, we have no reason to fear or be worried.

I love you all!

Elder Swenson