Week by Week with Sister Griffith: Week 30: A Full Plate

March 8, 2016

Well, not much time to write... that seems to be a theme, doesn't it? I'll tell you.. this hour and a half to email just zooms on by real quick like. Well, alas, I will try to put together a few thoughts in the last few minutes I have to write.

This week proved to be one with a plate full of so many things, but mostly food. I went down to Sandpoint for exchanges with the Sister Training Leader and we had a really awesome day. We started off our exchange by going to a really popular restaurant here that a member so conveniently owns so they give missionaries half-off.. Panhandler's Pies.. DELICIOUS! Anyway, so that was awesome because everyone kept telling me I needed to eat there before I get transferred, so "CHECK!" Anyway, so then we go out to an appointment near the river to teach a recent convert of theirs, Tracy. She was amazing!! Sister Ungricht (our STL) said that on Sunday she just randomly showed up out of no where and was like, "Hey, I met the missionaries over in Washington in October, got baptized in November, and have been a member for 3 months and decided to move up here to Sandpoint. If you will reteach me the missionary lessons because I didn't learn a ton, that would be awesome." So, that was cool. Anyway, so we had legitimately just gotten done with lunch and we get out to Tracy's and she's like, "Thanks for coming, Sisters.. By the way, I just made lunch for you." So.... what do you do other than grin and bear it? So, lunch #2 happened.... it was yummy, but man was my tummy full after that one. The awesome thing though was that Tracy had invited her nonmember friend to come too, so we were able to teach her friend who said that she really appreciated us coming by and said that she felt a really good presence about us.. That was way cool. Then, we were there for quite a while because Tracy had been sharing a lot with her friend and so the friend, Cynthia, had a lot of questions. Well, by the time we got out of that lesson, it was time for our dinner appointment. So, we went to that.... Meal #3. 3 LARGE meals in 3 hours. Woah. That was intense. It is such a blessing, though, to be serving in an area of the world where we have so much food just offered to us and provided and we don't have to worry about where our next meal is coming from.. what an amazing blessing.

That night we also got to help out at mutual. We had this really neat object lesson where we set out pieces to the Plan of Salvation and had a youth come forward, look at the diagram to how the pieces were supposed to go, and then they were blindfolded and had to try to put them all together in the right way. Struggling because they were alone and couldn't see, we invited another person to come forward and help them - the only catch? They had to be blindfolded too... Obviously that wasn't going to be much help, so we invited two other youth to come forward and to guide them through it. Tell them where to put their hand down, where to move the pieces to, etc, but they couldn't do it for them. We were supposed to be teaching about missionary work, so this was our object lesson. People who don't know about the church or the Plan of Salvation (Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where will we go after we die?) are spiritually blindfolded and they can't do it all by themselves. However, if they want someone to help them who is also spiritually blindfolded, it doesn't help them at all.... so, we need people who know about the Gospel, members and missionaries alike, to come forward and to tell them the things they can do (where to move the pieces - prayer, scripture study, church attendance, etc) to be happy and to figure out the puzzle so that they too can take off their blindfolds and someday help others as well... but the missionaries can't do it for them (no matter how much we may want to sometimes...). Hopefully that made sense, because it was a really neat experience.

Something really awesome that happened this week was that we had a really cool experience with a lady named Linda. She was on our Potentials List and we felt prompted one evening around 8pm to go see her. We went, and she said at first that she wasn't interested. Well, we gave a second attempt and tried again and asked her "Linda, what would you like to be true?" She said, "The afterlife." "What would that look like?" "A continuation of Earth, only peaceful." We testified to her that this life is not the end and that she will indeed see her family again. She said that she loves Family History work and so we told her that the reason LDS members are so involved in family history is because we know that our families can be together forever. We invited her to attend the family history center and left her with a prayer and scheduled a return appointment. It was so amazing! ...other than the fact that she texted us last night and told us that she didn't really want to talk religion right now and might be interested later, but it was a really neat experience none-the-less.

Well, my time is pretty much up, but I just want to leave you all with a spiritual thought about trials becoming better through righteous living. Imagine a 2 liter bottle filled with dirty, dark sand. This bottle has a hole on either side of it that is the size of only one grain of sand. Each time we do something right, such as reading our scriptures, saying our prayers, going to church, changing a bad thought into a good one, etc, it is like putting a piece of white sand into one end of the bottle. That automatically forces a dirty piece of sand out the other end. Now, if we look at that bottle at face value, we probably won't be able to see that piece of white sand at all, but we need to not get discouraged. We can't be like, "Well, that didn't work very well, so I guess I'll just disregard all of these good things and try something else." We need to keep putting more white sand into that bottle - a grain at a time. Over a while, we will be able to see those white grains of sand. They will become dominant and eventually fill the entire bottle.

Well friends, that's about all I have for you this week. I hope that you have the best week and "Remember who you are and who God expects you to become" and might I add, who Heavenly Father knows you have every ability to become. :) Love you all! Thanks for your love and prayers. They are felt and appreciated more than you know. :)