The Power of Book of Mormon

I love our zone meeting last week! It was so spiritual! It was so powerful! Our Sister Training Leaders taught us about Using Time Wisely. It gave me such a huge impact. The Spirit was so powerful. That even at this moment, while I am writing this letter to you, I am feeling the same feeling that I felt during our zone meeting. Heavenly Father knows how much I wanted to become a better missionary after our zone meeting. I will never have these 18 months again. I just want to give all that I have and all that I am in this work. I am praying and praying for His help for I know self-discipline can’t do it alone. I need His grace. I need the enabling power of His atonement. I know He wants me to be successful. I know that He will help me. I know that He will give me strength beyond my own natural ability to accomplish things after all that I can do. I do not want to end my mission full of regrets. I do not want that. Heavenly Father doesn’t want that too! I do not have enough words to properly express my gratitude of how grateful I am for this privilege that I have to be a missionary. My heart is full. And He keeps on filling my heart each and every day of my life as a missionary.

I’m done with my first cycle as a missionary. And it’s getting better and better. We have 7 candidates for baptism on January 24, and I know and I can feel that they KNOW that our message is true. But knowing is not enough. Believing is not enough. Without works (keeping the commitments), faith is dead. So we’re focusing now how to get these people keep the first 3 commitments: Read from the Book of Mormon, pray about it, and go to church.

This week, I have seen the power of the Book of Mormon in missionary work. Before, I just wanted to teach our prepared lesson even if they haven’t read from the Book of Mormon. So yesterday, we instead read 3 Nephi 27 with Tatay Tungpalan (an investigator) since he did not read. I FELT THE SPIRIT. I SAW THE LIGHT IN HIS EYES WHILE WE WERE TALKING ABOUT HOW WE OUGHT TO BECOME LIKE JESUS CHRIST. When we ended our lesson, he asked us “How can a person become a saint?”.. And all of the sudden, I remember Mosiah 3:19For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

Then he said, “I hope my kids are like the two of you”. Because for the past months, he’s telling us that his son became a stubborn teenager. His son was always in the top of his class until he became addicted with computer games. He’s not studying and failing at school. I told him, that when I was also a teenager, I came to the point that I did not want to go to school anymore. I didn’t go to school for two weeks because I just couldn’t handle the pain of death of my grandfather who was always there to motivate me with my goals in life. And then I became an insecure teenager – I felt ugly with my ugly hair and ugly face – that I did not want to go to school. I did not want people to see me – the ugly me. Until I started reading the book of mormon. I bore my testimony that because of the book of mormon, everything just changed. My perspective about life, and about myself. JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING. I love the Spirit so much. I love being a missionary.

And yes, Sherwin, the less-active who started reading the book of mormon went to church yesterday.

For now, I just want to focus on helping investigators and less actives read the book of mormon. Elder Bowen said, when these people are not grounded in the book of mormon, 4-5 years from now, they will not be in the church. I do not want that to happen. Being baptized without being grounded on the book of mormon is like sowing on the stony ground, without root, "where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: but when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away” (Mark 4:5–6). They should be sowed on the good ground – the book of mormon – to sprung up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.

I love being a missionary! And I love the book of mormon!

Ito pala yung sapatos ko. ito yung mga natirang sapatos ng isang tongan at isang pilipina. Pinagsama ko nalang. Malakas kasi ulan dito. Kaya ito ginagamit ko. Haahaha.