It is HOT!!!

Dear friends and family,

Illinois is roasting me! It's gotten up in the 90's the last couple of days and of course they were the days that we were on bikes! I have got a pretty spiffy watch tan-line and I'm sportin' a pretty fantastic farmer's tan. I'm loving it!

This week was a pretty great one! We had another lesson with our investigator Jose Carlos and it was another learning experience for me on just letting the Spirit take the reigns. Jose has a baptismal date for July 1st and he really wants to get baptized, so we need to teach him a lot in just a little bit of time. We both went into that lesson with a really specific plan and I even thought in my head something like, "I think the Spirits going to have to take a backseat on this one so that we can teach everthing on time". Yea, I know, What were you thinking Elder Arkoudas!?

Well about 10 minutes into the lesson, Jose looked bored and the member we had invited was about to fall asleep. Now I was thinking something like, "well, we blew this lesson, might as well wrap it up..." but then I immediately thought of repentance. Who's to say that we couldn't repent right there in the middle of the lesson and turn it over to the Spirit? So I said a little prayer in my head asking for forgiveness and for Heavenly Father to help us fix this mess, and literally, not two seconds later, a question popped into my head. I asked the question and Jose lit up--complete 180 turn around. More questions kept flowing and one by one, every single thing that we had planned on teaching fell into place.

I think a lot of times we think that we need a fresh start in order to repent and that is just not true. God wants us to repent today and he wants us to change right now! We don't need to be perfect and we don't need to change a lot, but we need to stop waiting for new chances to start again; when we make a mistake, we need to turn around as soon as possible and correct that mistake. I know that if we do that, God will bless us--it may not be 2 seconds later--but it will come and I think the second we agree to align our will with God's, he offers his council to us and helps us to preform his will.

One more cool experience from this week. We had decided to stop by a couple in our area to see if we could turn them into investigators and as we started walking down the street towards their house from our car, I got the very distinct thought to go back to the car and grab an English Book of Mormon. As we did, just a couple yards, we "bumped" into a woman, Zelma. We started talking to her and she lit up when she realized we were missionaries. We talked to her a little bit about the Book of Mormon and then got her address and phone number and parted ways. We gave that information to the English Elders the next day and now, just 3 days later, both Zelma and her boyfriend have baptismal dates for the 19th of August! Isn't the Spirit just so cool!?

Elder Arkoudas

    *Below is an excerpt from his letter to his dad this week *

Dad,

First of all, to make sure you know, moving from Montana was the best thing that could have happened to me and it was DEFINITELY for the best! But now looking back, I would not mind moving back to Montana. In fact, when people ask me where I'm from, I say Montana (because everybody just assumes that I'm from Utah and I like to prove people wrong). I also have realized that I want to live somewhere where not everybody is Mormon. But anyways.

As I was reading the part about "aspiring to the honors of men" in your email, I thought of a story that I heard about a month ago. I don't have it word for word so I'll just give you the gist...

There was a return missionary who had given a talk in church at a ward in his stake where after, the stake patriarch came up to him and asked him "why don't you belive in teaching by the Spirit?" He gave him a scripture to read and then just left him there in the chapel. Well, later that night, the Bishop from his ward called him and told him that they wanted him to speak the next Sunday. This return missionary tried to get out of it, but the Bishop told him that he was going to speak, he could pick whatever topic he wanted and then he hung up.

All week this return missionary stewed over what to speak about and how he was going to teach by the Spirit. He said that he wanted to give a good talk so that he could impress his parents, the ward, and some friends that were coming to watch him but he decided that he was going to leave it up to the Lord and so he studied his scriptures, he prayed about it and then Sunday he showed up to Sacrament meeting with absolutely nothing written down, not even a topic. As the Sacrament was passed and as the young men returned after to sit with their families he thought to himself, "at least just pick a topic!" But instead, he thought, if the Lord can give me a talk, he can give me a topic also. So this young man starts speaking and proceeds to give a 20 minute talk without a single note written down.

After his talk, instead of people coming up to him and telling him how good his talk was,  a man came up to him and said, "Do you know that you quoted almost an entire paragraph from my patriarchal blessing in your talk?" A lady approached him and said, "I have had a question for 30 years and have not been able to find an answer until I listened to your talk today." Finally, a man came up to him and said, "I have some things that I need to fix and I have not had the courage to do anything about it until after your talk today. I am going to go talk to the Bishop right now".

I love this story so much and it has become an example for the rest of my life. I think it is so powerful when we sacrifice our own will and desires and maybe even our pride to allow the Spirit to work in us and I think that we will always receive blessings for it. I'll include a story that I had with this just this last week in my weekly email but I know that when we just sacrifice ourselves and do the Lords will he will use us and bless us.

I love you dad and I am so grateful to receive your emails. I hope that everything goes well with you and I guess just don't worry about the kids, just make sure that they serve missions and God will fix them. He sure is fixing me!

Love you!

Elder Arkoudas