Monday, October 6, 2014

Blessings of Listening to General Conference

 Dear Family & Friends,

What a wonderful blessing to hear from our Prophet and Apostles this weekend.  We watched it in Harborn at the Stake Center.  So three buses and two hours later we were finally at our destination and ready to learn from the spirit.  We did not have investigators in attendance with us.  I have realized that not many of the Ward members in England don't go to General or Stake Conference.  As I have gotten older I have enjoyed General Conference more and more.  As a little kid it was the weekend you would try and sleep in as long as you could.  Or do something so you didn't have to listen to it.  I have just now found the blessings of watching and listening intently.  I learned a lot from this one.  I liked the common theme of how to get a testimony and how to keep it.  As a missionary we are always teaching people how to receive personal revelation and then what to do next with it.  I really liked how multiple people talked on that same subject.  The other talk that I liked was about how we cant believe everything we read in the news or Internet about what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints believe.  As a Missionary we have people that try and tell us what we believe.  Some of the the things they say are true and most of them false.  But as long as your testimony is centered in the fact that Joseph Smith is a prophet you don't need to worry about what other people say.  People are not perfect and mistakes have been made.

Question this week was "When did you actually know that you were going on a Mission"?  I think I decided to go when it was announced that we could go earlier.  I still remember what happened.  I think that my family was gone for the weekend.  I had gotten home the night before from BYU-I and had just taking three tests and was exhausted. So it was me and Bruno our big black lab at home and I stayed up way late playing Xbox and watching TV.  Slept tell noon when my mom called me and said, "are you watching Conference? You will never believe what President Monson just announced".  After that I Jumped on face book and saw all of my friends posting on face book that they were going to go now.  So I just followed the crowd to a degree.  I was already planning on putting my papers in December of that year, so the announcement just made my game plan one month sooner. 

The tender mercy for the week was busing to the Stake Center to watch General Conference.  We hit the buses just right and jumped off one and ran to the other.  We made good time getting to the Stake Center and back.  I have never had that happen.  We usually miss one.

But this week we visited a less active that we have been visiting every week.  He has been away from the Church for about twenty years or something like that.  We have started to see some progress with him. We have noticed that our visits are just on the door step but have been getting progressively longer.  He is starting to enjoying us coming around I hope.  So that was a cool thing to see.  I cant wait to see what will happen in a couple of months with him.

General Conference has been a spiritual recharge for the week, I cant wait to read and study the Conference talks as they come out!  Love this Gospel!

Love Elder Nielsen





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