Nov 16 Spiritual & Physical Preparation

This week has been quite fun and exciting and sudden and stuff. Our mission president really likes to run this mission 100% on inspiration. Most the time he acts right when he receives inspiration, no matter what else it may interrupt. Right now he is working very hard on opening a new island in our mission called Manu'a. He has taken a few random missionaries with him to help open up the island. One of the missionaries he took is from my district so right now we are doing an exchange with his companion. So right now in our companionship we have Elder Lamoreaux, Elder Larson and Elder Bybee.

Elder Bybee is from Oregon and has been here in Samoa for  just over one year and speaks really good Samoan. This week has been very very busy because we have been covering both areas. Sorry the email is a bit late as well, we are all using one computer so that is slowing things down a bit.

This week we had a cool experience with an investigator named brother Masoe. He comes to church every sunday but he will not commit to taking the missionary lessons because he has a problem with the word of wisdom and he feels unworthy to take them. We met with brother Masoe yesterday and taught him a lesson about the atonement of Jesus Christ. We had a very spiritual lesson and we taught him that the Atonement can and will make him clean and help him over come his weaknesses if he will make the effort on his part to try to accept the help that Jesus is trying to give him. At the end of the lesson he said that he was ready to start the lessons. It brings me happiness to see people overcome fears and doubts and especially sins through the atonement of Jesus Christ.

In other news..... We are still working with Taua, the high chief of Amanave and helping her to learn more about the gospel and its teachings. The last things we have taught her is the importance of prayer and study to know for herself if this is true or not. We have not met with her for a little while and she hasn't been answering our calls, we hope that it is just because she is busy.

Lately church leaders in this area have really been stressing self reliance. Right now Samoa is entering hurricane season and so they have been telling everyone that we need to prepare them and their family for the event of a natural disaster. While physical preparation is very very important, I have been thinking a lot about spiritual preparation. We are living right now in a time of spiritual hurricane season. We have seen a lot of people fall away from the church or fall into sin in the past little while. We all need to prepare ourselves spiritually for the times that lie ahead. Physical and spiritual preparation are a little bit different. 

Spiritual preparation is getting ourselves ready to listen to and obey spiritual promptings. We can all agree that in the days coming we will all need to be in a spiritually prepared state where we will be able to recognize all spiritual promptings. In order to get to this state we need to do 3 specific things: Feast upon the words of Christ, Sincerely communicate with our Father in Heaven, and get closer to God through fasting. These are three things that will prepare us spiritually for the dangerous times that lay ahead. I encourage all of you to focus more and more on these three simple things. When we do these things the spirit will be able to communicate with us and warn us about oncoming danger.

I hope and pray that you will all have a very good week,

Alofa atu ia outou,

-Elder Lamoreaux