Elder Ho: The Quarter Mark

So I've finished my fourth transfer in the mission, which means I'm officially a quarter done, which is kind of scary. It really makes you reflect on what you've done so far and wonder if you're truly making the most of it. So I'm still with the same companion, but anyways, this past week...

So one cool thing that happened was I went to a members house for dinner, and when we knocked on the door our convert back in my last area answered! with her husband (the husband was the son of the members we were eating with). It was an awesome dinner and we talked about how the Capalaba ward was (the last area I was in), and how her friend got baptized too now, and about her husband's mission, and it was a pretty fun dinner. We also taught a lesson at the end, and they pretended to be investigators, to help us practice teaching, and it reminded of me of when I got to teach her around 5 months ago, it was pretty cool.

As for the temperature here, it's still rising. Every day seems hotter than the last, but that's alright. We got to do service for nearly four hours straight on morning in the sun, but it was a really good experience. We did it for an older man named Brother Ball, and he's really awesome. He loves the missionaries and we often get to do service for him. This time we got a truckload of soil and moved it all around his front and back yard, trying to fill in the holes and make the ground even.

I guess today I'll leave with a cool lesson I learned from my district leader, Elder Tai. He's awesome, and I got to go on tradeoffs with him and experience his awesomeness. He was teaching an investigator about overcoming the natural man, and I'll just kind of share what I took from that lesson. Basically, everyone has the natural man. Unfortunately, there are many people that are overcome by it. We often wonder why certain people are successful in life, whether it's our peers or maybe people we hear or read about. For many of them, they were given the same chance as everyone else, but the only difference between them and everyone else is that every day they fought to overcome the natural man. We all have goals in life, and the way to reach those goals is to constantly fight the natural man. our ultimate goal is to return to live with our Heavenly Father again, and the only way to do that is through overcoming the natural man. It's a fight every day, and usually the small fights are the toughest ones. It's so easy to skip reading scriptures for a day, or to skip our prayer at night or in the morning, or say a short one. Its easy to do the bare minimum requirements for our callings, or cut corners. But the natural man is an enemy to God, and our Heavenly Father knows our potential and who we can become. By overcoming even the smallest temptations from the natural man, by reading scriptures every day and saying sincere prayers, to even some of the tougher challenges, like magnifying our calling and devoting all our efforts to the Lord, we can reach that potential that He knows we can reach.

Thank you for your love and support,

Elder Ho

My first zone (when I was in Capalaba)