86th Week

Hallo mijn familie!
Hoe gaat het met jullie? Alles prima? Ik maak het heel goed. Kunt u het geloven? Ik ben 23 deze week geworden. Ik ben zo oud! Bijna dood!

I'll stop the dutch there. Serious though, how are you all doing? I hope you are doing well. I've been doing really well this last week which was a great blessing. We worked really hard and we did our best to follow the spirit and we saw, once again, the blessing of God. Saying that though, I can't believe it is my birthday again on Thursday and I'll be 23. I'm so old! In Suriname right now, I am the oldest Elder in terms of life and almost in terms of on the mission time. What a crazy experience it has been.
Say that though, the biggest blessing we saw this week had to be the amount of member work we were able to have. Member work has always been a struggle with me as I just haven't been able to get members to come out and work with us. Since we've got to this new area though, we've been averaging just about 9 member lessons a week which for Suriname is a lot. I haven't really compared us to anyone else but I'd think it safe to say that we are on the high end of the spectrum right now. A long with that though, we've had multiple instances of being led by the spirit to say exactly the right things at the right time which is a huge blessing because sometimes you are just left thinking, "now what?" It really has been a good week to say the least.
As I told my Dad last week, and he sent it out to you, I've been keeping my thankfulness journal this entire week and it has been a cool experience. Sometimes, it is really hard to think of things you are thankful for but nonetheless it is still possible. Always possible. I find when I struggle to find something to be thankful for all it takes is a bit of time and a little pondering and then I can always think of one.
I also had a cool experience studying the scriptures this week. I've really tried to incorporate pondering into my studying and so I've been working with Enos 1:3-4 trying to figure our how I could work such a desire into my life. Knowing, of course, that a powerful desire can and normally does lead to a great success. As I was pondering it this morning I was prompted to follow the footnotes and I discovered what I think is a spiritual truth. You see, we all try to satisfy our hungers. Whether that be a spiritual or a physical hunger. It is such a powerful influence that in the times of old, women in Jerusalem actually killed their babies and then ate them to satisfy their hunger. Sometimes though, we satisfy our hunger with bad or temporary things. For example, a child will eat candy or ice cream to satisfy the hunger instead of cooking something to eat. What this leads to though, is a temporary fullness or you could say an empty fullness. So it is with us spiritually, if we are so busy trying to satisfy our spiritual hunger with sleepy scripture study or impersonal prayers then we will eventually lose that desire to achieve more, to be better. Instead we just satisfy our spiritual hunger with candy. Rather, we need feast upon the scriptures and wrestle with God in mighty pray in order to satisfy our spiritual hunger. Doing so can lead us to develop an desire to achieve Celestial Glory and become everything that we can become. I hope that makes some sense as it really hit me powerfully and I just wanted to share it with you.
All in all though, I'm doing great and I love you all very much! I'll talk with you next week!

Love you,
Elder Nathan John Nielson


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