Opposition in all Things

 This last week was good! Starting a lot of good habits, but I'm still trying to get out of the funk of my sickness. I still had a stuffy nose this whole week but I feel my strength is back to normal.

This last week was a little irregular because we had MLC (Mission Leadership Council). It was really good and all but it still takes 7 hours out of our schedule so that's a bit of a bummer.

We had a lot of our people also cancel on us so we were just left biking to and from a lot, which is kind dukes.

We met with Charlie again and he's still awesome, and so is Sak Seth (Set). I love both of them so much!

I feel like one of my personality traits out here on a mission is I just share like my whole heart with people, which in return can hurt me back sometimes because when they don't accept the gospel, which is so very dear to me, it hurts. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I just want to say as a missionary you get a taste of what Jesus Christ might have felt like to be rejected. I'm literally sharing the gospel for no profit, we don't get a pay raise depending on how many people come to church or how many people get baptized. Matter of fact, we don't get paid at all, haha, it's all volunteer work. Which means I'm merely doing this because I love the people and I know that I've found immense joy in the Gospel of Jesus Christ so I want to share it with others too.

Mosiah 28:3

"Now they were desirous that salvation should be declared to every creature, for they could not bear that any human soul should perish; yea, even the very thoughts that any soul should endure endless torment did cause them to quake and tremble."

So it hurts when you plan to eat some food and share more of the gospel with your recent convert and your teaching friends just to find out the teaching friend isn't there, so you leave your food and go teach others. When you come back your teaching friend is back (yayyy!) But so are her friends and now all of a sudden your teaching friend doesn't want to learn about Jesus at all, and doesn't want to eat with us either. So we just leave them with a farewell and our food after a full Sunday of not eating 😭😭😭 to then go teach other people.

That is just a hard time though, the good times wipe out the hard times 10 to 1.

Like for example, most every where we go we get a wave of compliments of how good we are at the Khmer language and how smart we must be to learn it this well in just 2 years😆 Khmer people are very blunt, for good and for bad haha

Anyways, for this week's spiritual thought I wanna talk about the Prophet, President Dallin H Oaks's last General Conference talk, he spoke about loving our "adversaries" and being filled with the pure love of Christ which is charity! What an amazing talk from him and I feel it's perfect for today's world. How often do we fill our minds with hate and negativity because of someone else's influence on us. We make ourselves captive to satan when we do that! If we could just look at everyone in the eyes that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ look through then we would be able to be free from satan and his ways. I just love that talk so much because President Oaks is a prophet telling us it's possible, it's still part of the two great commandments and should be the focus of our lives.

I promise if you try to apply his teachings to your life you will see the Lord's hand working in your life🙏

~Elder Acton