6-18-12

Hello everyone! I hope you are all having wonderful weeks! My email this week is going to be a little short. I hope that's ok.

Things are going well. We still have two investigators preparing for baptizm, and that's wonderful. :) They are learning a lot, and are happy to learn. They are even getting married, in part to live the law of chastity. :) Wonderful.

I thought I would share a piece of a conversation I was having with my grandma, and my mom:

"One thing I started working on before I left for my mission was the idea of 'retaliate with love'. When someone loves you, retaliate with love. When someone is not so nice to you, retaliate with love. Fighting punches with hugs. That kind of idea. :)"

This applies to all of life. When an unhappy thought comes up in your mind, retaliate at it with a loving thought. A positive replacement for the negativity. When someone says an unhappy thing, retaliate at them by thinking and speaking positively. It will help a lot. :)

I challenge you all to try to retaliate more and more with love. You will become so much more of a happier person.

I made pigs in the blanket this week finally! They turned out very well. They got a little darker brown than I would have liked, but they weren't really burned. They were delicious. I will attatch pictures. If they aren't up here on the post, bother my family about it. ;)

Well, have a wonderful week everybody! Retaliate with love, and don't forget to read in the scriptures. Make this a good week. :) I will close with a wonderful quote my grandma shared with me from a book she is reading:

"The injunction to repent is, in effect, an injunction to change one's mind. This is not a trivial requirement. In fact, it suggests a profound transformation. In Classical Greek, the word noos may be variously translated "mind," "thought," "reason," "intellect," "purpose," "will," "heart," "design," or, we might say, "mind as the active principle of the universe." In light of this, Jesus' commandment to repent, becomes a call for the transformation of the individual, the remaking of the self at the most profound level. Christ calls upon His listeners to become completely new creatures. Closely linked to that change, and in an interactive and inextricable relationship with it, is faith: We must believe the gospel as a sometimes precursor to, sometimes result for, the necessary transformation."

-Elder Miles