"Oh Robert Looooves Glenn"

Sooo,

Update this week.

This week was really eventful. I've loved it. There was a lot of good but I don't know where to start. 

Here, we'll start--so we met this awesome new couple. I'll describe them a little bit. So Bob (not the same bob I've mentioned before) and his wife. I'll describe what he looks like first. He wears an old hat that says "Christ King" on it and "Jesus" on the brim (In houston christian merchandise is fairly popular). and he was wearing a shirt saying something about his rights to have a gun and had camo on it. They're a pretty stereotypical 'Texan' family. He was like, "ya, one reason I know a bit about ya Mormons is Glen Beck" then his wife popped it, "Oh Robert Looooves Glenn" "I do not love him honey" "oh he loves him, I'll tell ya." But we had some fun teaching them. They're great.

Another highlight is our lesson with Bob (not the one with the crazy war stories). This is the one that is a somewhat less-active member. We went over on Sunday and talked about the plan of salvation. The conversation went a lot of places and it was great, but the Spirit really entered in the room at the end when we started singing together. Bob used to sing barber shop quartet. We just went through a few songs out of the Hymn book and picked which parts of Harmony we would sing and went through them. The Spirit came really powerfully. He wanted to sing more songs but we ran out of time. He's an awesome guy. But music is just really powerful. I love it. 

I went on an exchange with Elder Sami in the bacliff area (which is pretty much the most ghetto/redneck/white trash place i've ever seen) it was a really fun day. A lot of people there live in really messy and old trailers. It's a city right by the coast. There were a lot of interesting people.

So, it's mardi gras here so at a member's house we celebrated by eating bbq ribs and some king cake. Mardi gras is huge here, they have a ton of stuff going on and eating king cake is one of the big traditions. There's usually a plastic little fake baby hidden in the cake somewhere and whoever gets the baby has to put on the next celebration.

Well I gotta get goin. Love y'all! Have a good week!

Love, Elder Russell

some good stuff

Hey I don't have time to give a very big update this week. I'll try to give some good stuff though. 

Sooo... it's been warming up quite a bit. This week most of the days I got to wake up at 4:25am for a choir thing we did for some zone conferences in the mission. Valentine's day was normal. Yesterday we were going to a dinner appointment and all a sudden while we were walking over there it smelled like good old antelope island. I was reminded of that wonderful place and then turned the corner and saw that a sewage pipe had broken and the sidewalk was covered with a bunch of stuff. Isn't weird that the same smell of dead birds, dead brine shrimp, salty sand and dead flies and a bunch of mosquitoes can equal sewage? weird huh.  I gave a talk in sacrament meeting and one of our good friends named Bob was sitting in the front row. he's a character. he's semi-less-active but we spend a lot of time with him. He was making faces with his eyes crossed and tongue out at me the whole time trying to get me to laugh. at the end of the talk when I was trying to get everyone all pumped up about the subject I was speaking on his phone went off and it must have been on full blast. It was playing like led zepplin or something. He didn't hear it for like 10 seconds cause he's kind of old, so I just felt like a baptist preacher preaching to rock music. it was good though. He's awesome. well..

Love y'all have a good one!

immortality and eternal life of man

Love y'all!! it was so good to get the pictures form ya!

Man I am just in such a good mood. Life is so good. Missionary work is awesome. Lately I've been reading a ton! I made some really big 'year 2' goals for reading and divided them into smaller and smaller goals so I will have week by week and day by day goals. I love the scriptures. I could spend all day in them. They are great. And I am around awesome people all the time. The people here (my companion, the other missionaries, the members, former members from my last ward) are all so fun to be around.

This week has been great! Not too much of an update that I can think of...

I just heard some good knews from one of my last companions (Elder Iloilo) he was telling me about some of the people we had been working with and many of them I had been kind of sad about because they had stopped reading and wouldn't pray even though we had very spiritual lessons with them and we'd spent so much time praying for them. Elder Iloilo told me that they came back and many are preparing to be baptized. I was at a devotional we put on for members and investigators last night and one of the speakers was talking about how no efforts are wasted when they are for the Lord. Whenever you share your testimony or a gospel truth it is never wasted. I don't think we begin to see the true results of our actions in this life but they are great.

mosiah 2:17, when you're in the service of your fellow beings you're in the service of God. How could you serve God? You'd have to be assisting him in His work and His purpose. What is His purpose? It's to bring about the immortality and eternal life of man (Moses1:39). Galations 6:2, Mosiah 18:8-12 talk about bearing one anothers burdens and comforting them who need comfort. These are commitments to serve that we make when we make our covenants with God. We're covenanting to put forth a greater love and be instruments in God's hands to bring about His plan. Service is motivated by love. Love is the motive of God's works. That's why God is love (1 John 4:8-10).

Well those are just some thoughts. I Love y'all! Have a good week!

-Elder Russell

more fun pictures