Discipleship and Service

Dear friends and family,

This week was a really quick one but at the same time, so excruciatingly slow. Both Elder Wright and I fell under the weather but on separate days so we were bed ridden a couple days this week.

Other than that, we had exchanges with the Zone leaders this week which were awesome! I got to go with Elder Wells this time and we had an absolute blast. We started out just walking down through this neighborhood and as we were walking we passed by 3 guys raking a yard. We stopped and offered to help and the main guy was a little hesitant to let us help (this was a job for them) but as Elder Wells and I grabbed some rakes and started raking up a storm they quickly warmed up to us. Anyway, the main guy, Lamar, as we finished turned to us and said something like, "I'm never going to forget this day, this was so cool. I've never had two guys just come up and help me like this and do such good work too! Can I get your number so that we can talk when I'm a little less busy?" What a powerful testimony builder for me of the power of service.

This kind of leads me to the main message of my email today which is about Discipleship. For a long time I just thought about trying to be a good missionary instead of just trying to be a good disciple of Jesus Christ and it kind of made me stiff and buisiness-like--not really the best "example of the believers". As I watched General Conference though, along with some other experiences lately, I realized that the best representative of Jesus Christ is one of his disciples, someone who is actively trying to become like Him.

One of my favorite talks is "Symbol of our Faith" by President Hinckley where he talks about what is the true symbol of Christianity. My favorite quote from the talk goes as follows...

"As His followers, we cannot do a mean or shoddy or ungracious thing without tarnishing His image. Nor can we do a good and gracious and generous act without burnishing more brightly the symbol of Him whose name we have taken upon ourselves. And so our lives must become a meaningful expression, the symbol of our declaration of our testimony of the Living Christ, the Eternal Son of the Living God.

It is that simple, my brethren and sisters, and that profound and we’d better never forget it."

I just want to add my testimony to that of President Hinckley's: as members of the true and living church of Jesus Christ, it is our solemn DUTY to be kind; to be true; to be helpful; and to serve as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ served, with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength so that we may--someday--be perfect, even as he is perfect.

I love you all and I hope that this week is full of opportunities to be more like our Savior. I know that he lives, and I know that he leads this church through modern day Prophets and Apostles; I KNOW that is true! God bless you all and keep you safe!

Before I close though, I do want to share a super cool story that happened this week. We were walking in kind of the sketchier side of town and we met these 3 guys and started talking to them. The conversation started out ok but quickly changed to these 3 big black guys almost yelling at us, spewing nonsense about how King James was really black and that the Cannanites in the bible are really good guys--yea, it was weird. But as these guys are bashing with us, this woman pulls up to us and asks to talk to me. Of course I'm excited because I think she wants to talk about the Gospel, but then she pulls out her Rockford PD Detective badge and says really calmly, "Rockford Police, can I talk to you for a second?" Now I'm REALLY excited because now I think that she's going to ask us to go undercover or something (I don't know...) and so we ended our conversation with our 3 Cannanite Brothers (I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that) and go over to talk to a real life detective. It was kind of anticlimactic because she just wanted to make sure that we were ok and to rescue us from our Cannanite brothers but in the end, it was cool and now I know that there are guardian angels out here protecting those two white guys in the projects (and now you can know that too mom).

Love you all!

Elder Arkoudas

1. Sick day. Elder Wright was really feeling bad.

2. Chicago style deep dish.

3. 7 patties...7 hours of regret...