Not good-bye to a year, but hello to the new year in front of me...

“You say yes, I say no, you say stop and I say go go go, don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.” Okay so this is rad, I have come to the half-way mark of my mission. I hit one year on Thursday. I’ve decided to not let last year die and say goodbye to it, but instead say hello to a new year in front of me. Welcome it with a warm song courtesy of the Beatles. Which I miss haha.

Also the minivan that we used to roll around in had to be taken back to the dealership, so we are back to bike here… yaaaaah.

This week has been a strange one; I can’t really explain my emotions right now about how I feel about being half way done. All I know is that I feel emotion of some kind haha. It is weird. I am forgetting the lyrics to songs I knew back home and I can only remember hymns haha. Don’t waste time in this life. It is too short, my mission is so short and I am so glad I have not wasted the Lord’s time. A weird way to look at my mission is that the two years I serve add up to 10% of my entire life so far. So by the end of this I will have been a full time missionary for ten percent of the time haha.

Right now I am sitting in a library in Portales, New Mexico as a 19 year old kid serving a mission. I was thinking the other day and there are roughly 405 missions in the entire world and within those missions there are over, idk, like 20-60 areas. And right now out of all of those places I could be, the Lord knows I will grow the most here. This world is specifically designed for you, for your situation and God is going to put you exactly where you need to be to help you grow the most.

This last year I have learned so much about who I really am and what I really want in life. One thing that I have learned is that you can be the smartest man on the face of the earth, you can know so much but still be so stupid. This last year I have studied and studied the Bible so I would be able to compete with these preachers that seriously live in every other house down here. But after all of that studying and all of the knowledge I gained, people still weren’t getting baptized, or converting. But the second I realized that it is not about knowing every little detail about everything that makes you smart, it is having the spirit, it is having God on your side. It’s good to gain knowledge, don’t get me wrong, but I would trade that for wisdom any day of the week.

Have a good week everyone… be safe and stay strong!

Love elder c