The Best Two Years

The Best Two Years

Monday, June 16, 2014

My Dad, The World Cup and Motivation

Hello everyone!

There was a man from Arraijan a couple weeks ago that came and gave a speech to us about family history.  I actually wasn't there because we were doing things for changes, but Elder Price told me something really interesting. He said that in the pre-existence, we had lots of friends, but before we came to earth, we picked our best friend to be our dad.  I think that is 100% true!  I am happy that I got to spend so much time with dad growing up.  Playing sports, young men’s, road trips, fishing, and all the other things we did.  Dad, I thank you for making it a big deal to do so many things with me.  It was always one of my favorite things to go fishing, hit some baseballs, or just watch a game together on the tv.  I hope I can become half the father and the man that you are!

This week was good.   We had a zone conference with three other zones on Wednesday in Brisas del Golf. We learned about the atonement.  Hermama Carmack talked about the steps of applying the atonement in our lives, and President talked about how we can more effectively teach the atonement to others.  He also gave us the answers to seven important questions on how to do missionary work.  One of those was "What is our motivation?" and another, "How do we obtain that motivation?" Missionary work is hard, and sometimes taking a nap sounds better than going and walking to appointments in the hot sun.  I learned that the motivation is the pure love of Christ.  There is a scripture in Moroni I think that says we need to pray to be filled with that love.  Because that love is perfect, if we are filled with it, we will have the strong, true desire to share the gospel with everybody.  That is what we are working on right now.  We don't have a lot of positive investigators, and so sometimes it is a little tough to go out when we don't have much planned.  But we go out every day, and I can tell that we are seeing the difference, in the area with our investigators, and in our lives.  We are happier, and we are getting more motivation to get out and teach! 

We are working hard on C's papers to prove that he has never been married, because he is a foreigner and we need to get them sent from Nicaragua.  He is so excited to get married because he doesn't want to be in sin anymore.  That will be an awesome baptism.  We went to go see P and A on Saturday, and they had another cousin die.  That makes for four recent deaths in their family.  At first, they didn't handle it well, but now they are doing great, because they understand the plan of salvation.  We read from Alma, where it talks about the resurrection with them.  They call the Book of Mormon the Moroni Book.  They are a little difficult to teach, because we think they both have dementia, and they don't pay attention for long periods of time, but they do understand that baptism is necessary, and they want to get baptized.

I have never seen a World Cup game before the mission, but now we see them all the time here.  Every house and public place has it on the tube!  Our ZL's have given us permission to watch some games, it is basically impossible to teach people without watching them. You watch it until the end, and then teach because they WILL NOT turn the game off!  We have a dinner appointment tonight with our neighbor Sam, he is a gringo.  He was a black hawk pilot in the military for 15 years! He invited us, the AP's and the ZL's over to watch the USA play Ghana, and then we will eat some dinner and have a family home evening with him and his wife. I think the US has some potential this year!   Well, not much more to report this week. Again, Happy Father's Day dad! What I will do is just bring all the gifts I have gotten home with me because it costs less that way, and I don't have to worry about them getting lost or broken.  You are all in my prayers!

Love,

Elder Austin Michael Kipp

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