Let God Cook

February 5, 2024

大家好！Hi Everyone! 

Wait a minute guys, this week went Fast! That’s crazy! What’s also crazy is that as of this next week, I’ll have been a missionary for 6 months! Which seems a little bit inaccurate -- to me it feels like I’ve either been a missionary for 3½  years or for 2 weeks   :P

Highlights of this week was mainly helping our friend Roda prep for receiving baptism next Sunday! We’ve made some miraculous progress so we’re just praying that we’ll be able to wrap up some of the last few small logistics this week! 

We also had Zone Conference this week! That was a blast! We had a very cool opening activity that involved a half hour of silence and some provided scriptures on a theme of “How do we deepen our relationship with God” -- more on that in a minute. The rest of the conference was good. There was a good example of how to plan out the day in the mornings, which made me want to improve the way we do it as a companionship! Hopefully we see some progress.

We had some wild service opportunities this week. The last three weeks we’ve been helping the same member move all of their stuff out of their house into a storage unit… and there is SOOO much stuff for a house that size! We then went in this week one day to help clean some floors and walls. . . although they were hard to get to because of the sheer amount of rat poop that was also found in the house (yucko). On the other hand we did get to help a different lady move into a different apartment downtown, and she was very clean, organized, and also kind of interested in the Church! We gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon in Traditional Chinese and promised the joy that comes from reading it, and she said it sounded really interesting! We’re hoping we see more of her soon!

We tried street contacting at a different university that is in the very south of our area. There weren’t a lot of people around that we were able to talk to, but there was a very fancy performance hall! Brought back a lot of memories for sure of different places I’ve performed, which was pretty cool!

Our car was parked on Saturday, because I didn’t update the log of how many kilometers we had driven, so we did a lot of walking around in the rain putting up English class flyers close by. A little unusual day, but it was really nice weather (at least, I think so).

Okay back to “How do we deepen our relationship with God.” There’s a lot of resources about this, specifically some words of our prophet Russell M. Nelson in speeches like “Let God Prevail” (or “Let Him Cook” as today’s slang might put it). One of the resources that I found was an article in last month’s Liahona magazine about “Slow looking.” This is a term used a lot by museums to try and encourage a new way of viewing art. I think we’ve all been to a museum and rushed through trying to look at every piece of art for a few seconds, but “Slow Looking” is a different approach: picking a very few artifacts and studying them for 5-10 minutes. This was really inspiring to me since I know there’s a lot that I learn about God from studying good art, but I don’t often take the time to do so. Similarly, we spend our scripture study time reading through all the material, but we don’t often spend a lot of time internalizing those scriptures and letting them sink in, and we may miss learning some valuable information. This week I invite you all to do two things that could help deepen your relationship with God. First, pick a piece of art in a style you like and find 10 minutes to really look at it and find some new truths about the Savior. Then, I also invite you to do the same with a few verses of scripture. I can promise that when we take time to slow down and look at the fine details, we’ll have an easier time seeing the hand of God as well.

Hope you all are doing well! We’re enjoying a lot of snow in Calgary right now, so let us know if you need some!

爱你们!

–熊长老

Photos:

rain :))

Elder Bigler and I at Mount Royal Performance Hall

What car is this? [it's a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S]

My celebratory Frosty after cleaning poopy floors for an hour