Seeing Afar Off

Why Hello everybody! How are you today? I expect you all to say "good" to that ^-^ Like out loud, right now, haha :) 

Well Elder Myers and I are working hard down her in Long Beach. Same old, just trying to bring people to Christ ^-^ It is tiring work sometimes! The other day we had to run up and down a basketball court for two hours just to get an investigator to meet some members! ;) We actually found a 15 year old kid named Devin last week who is pretty great! Has a HUGE desire to learn! So we played basketball with him and some other investigators, it was fun :)

I tried a new food for the first time this week: octopus. It was... Actually really good! The investigator who made it for us just held it out and said "here try some" and I was just staring at an octopus leg. I even tested the little suction cup things, they still kinda worked! But that was a new one for me ^-^ We also had some Samoan barbecue brought to us from the guy whose mother in law we gave a blessing to, which was delicious, and in the process we got to give his wife a book of Mormon and invite them to listen to the missionaries :) She isn't a member, but really felt comforted when we blessed her. 

Juan and Lesley did not come to church :/ But we are working on it with them. We have some other people we are working with too, more on them as they begin to progress. 

Something cool I learned this week. God gives us afflictions in this life to learn, of course. But something I never thought of before is this: Without afflictions, we would never turn to God or Jesus Christ. We would never NEED to. And we would never draw closer to Them. God loves us enough to hurt us, because he wants us to choose to come unto Him and in the process reach our divine potential. Afflictions lead to happiness, no doubt about it.

Another thought... I like this phrase: We must learn to see afar off. If we want people or our situations to change, we must see afar off and have hope for the future. If we want to prevent ourselves a lot of pain, we must see afar off and make right choices now to avoid future pain. We must learn to see afar off in our afflictions, knowing that we will be so much stronger and more able to serve in the future. God's plan is a long term plan. We must learn to see afar off in order to understand it.

I don't like to be that guy, but I thought it worth mentioning that I am coming home a month from yesterday. I mention that because I hope you can all make it to my homecoming, which will be the 8th of July, I believe, at 1:00. Mark your calendars, because I love you all and want to see you as soon as I can ^-^

But until then... I'll be over here giving all I can to the Lord. Forget yourselves and go to work. Not just missionaries: everyone.

Love you all! Thanks for taking the time to read this :) Let us all press on, 

Elder Poulson