Giving Thanks and Forgiving

I hope everyone is excited for thanksgiving, and are thinking about all the many many things we have to be grateful for. One of the things I'm grateful for is that I'm staying a second here in Annemasse with Elder Bentley! We're both super stoked to get to be here for Christmas, and we're also excited to continue to get to work here in Annemasse, we want to really start building off the success we're finally starting to see. We had the chance to go to another baptism this week for the sisters’ ami, who'd been taking the lessons for about six months, and finally made the choice to get married to his girlfriend, who's a member and had been helping him along the way, and get baptized. It was a really cool thing to get to talk to him and hear about all the changes he's made in his life, and it made me really thankful for the gospel.

 One of the coolest things I remarked on this week was something a member said yesterday in Sunday School. He said that the gospel and the scriptures in particular are like the seasons of the year. They're always the same, never changing, summer, fall, winter and spring, but you'll never have two winters or two summers exactly the same. In the same sense, the gospel and the scriptures never change, but we can get something new out of them every time we read them. It made me even more grateful for the chance to study the scriptures out here on a mission, cool experience.

I hope everybody is gearing up and ready for Christmas, because it's the best time of the year! This week was possibly the longest week of my mission, though not because anything particularly horrible happened to us, but mostly because my companion was sick all week. We had a normal Pday on Monday, but then Tuesday morning Elder Bentley woke up very very sick, and didn't get any better.

Sooo, long story short, we were in the apartment from Tuesday morning to Sunday morning. I spent the majority of my time either cleaning our apartment, taking care of my companion, calling people in the phone I don't know, or just studying my scriptures, made for a monotonous week.

However, church yesterday was a really neat, I wanted to share something. In Sunday School one of the sisters shared a really touching experience with the whole class. She talked about at one point in her life she had lived with her older sister for a while, and that they hadn't gotten along at all. They had had many arguments and she left with a lot of bitter feelings towards he sister. Then, shortly after she had moved out, her older sister died suddenly, without any warning. She started crying at this point and told us how much she wished she could have had the chance to apologize and reconcile with her sister before she passed away. The lesson was on forgiveness, and so she encouraged everybody really strongly to forgive others while we still can, that no matter what they may have done to us, we will feel much better if we forgive.



I wanted to encourage everyone at home, especially in the spirit of Christmas, to try and forgive someone, and to right a wrong, and watch how much better your Christmas season becomes because of it. I love you all, and pray for you, have a great week!