Man! Tommy's a doctor! What a guy.
I'm
glad everyone's having fun! Especially all of you in North Carolina.
Sounds like a blast! (Sounds great in Idaho, too, but... you know...
Danieboy is the center of everyone's world right now)
So! We had a great week, thank you. I'm a little bit short for words, but I'll try to right enough to make mommy happy.
We had a branch activity on Saturday
with the Fourtinas, which was absolutely fourtina. We were pretty
bummed that we invited a lot of less actives and non members to come,
and only one came for 5 minutes before the meal had begun. But, I'm sure
we'll be blessed in another way. Sister Lafortune's non member husband,
Roland, came which was great! He even accepted to offer to teach the
branch on some topic (that we weren't there to hear about) during
another fireside! Thats a big deal!
Church was great yesterday, we were 16 in total. I
gave a talk on unity, which I felt was a great topic that President
Fourtina gave. I wish I could share it all with you, but I didn't really
have it written down. But I started out the talk by sharing two stories
actually: Dallin's falling out of a tree at the Utah family reunion and
healing by Dad's blessing, and then our adventure on the Nicaraguan
volano. I related how Dad had to be united with God to know how to
respond and give the blessing. And also, that the fact that we were all
united to reach the top (with a little bit of encouragement hah), helped
us all reach it, and also for Dad to be there to catch Dallin from
falling near the top. I didn't purposefully choose 2 stories about Dad
saving Dallin, but rather to show how unity and love is essential in our
progress towards the eternities. The center of the talk was on John 17:11,
and 20-21. I love those verses! Unity is REALLYY a big principle that
needs to be understand and practiced here for real growth to happen, so I
was glad to try my best to teach that.
We taught Brother D'Amours and Brother LeBlond
in preparation for the Melchizedek Priesthood, and saw small but actual
progress. Yay! If we can involve more members in their progression,
we'll be able to see some good changes. And turns out that Brother
D'Amours received the Melchizedek Priesthood in 1988, but after
chemotherapy and years of inactivity and being 73 years old he had
forgotten. But I hope he'll still want to come back hah.
President Fourtina reminded us again that we want to
work on helping the members become independent. He says that we 3 will
all leave some day and the branch needs to be able to support itself in
our absense. I love that vision. Two ideas we've had since: A recent
convert of last year, Chantale, we are working with her to receive her
patrairchal blessing, which is great. But some hints that we've gotten
show that she had a big difficulty in reading and understanding the
scriptures. So that's going to be a skill that we're going to be working
on with her to help her truly become spiritually independent. Sister
Bujold we taught yesterday, during one of my favorite lessons that I've
had in a very long time. She opened up and said that she would like to
have help with the idea of one true doctrine, and hence if not, why
would we do temple work? I wish I could explain everything in the
lesson, but oh wow it was fun. In studying corresponding scriptures with
her, we could see her understanding grow. We read John 3:5, 1 Peter
3:18-20, 1 Corinthians 15:29,
and Joseph Smith History about the First Vision, among others. It was
great. She still has some way to go in some principles (like this
doctrine) but she's willing to learn which is so great. And through this
she can become more independent, and then help the other members.
I love the Gospel. Thanks for your love.
Love to all!
Elder Murphy
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