I Testify that the Heavens are Open

First of all, for the most important news....HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!  This week you´ll be 21, how exciting!  Love and miss you

So this week is Conference.  I´m stoked!  We´re allowed to go to the first Sunday session and the Priesthood session here without investigators, those 2 sessions are our freebies.  But if we want to go to the other sessions, we have to have investigators with us or we can´t get in.  Our zone leaders will be at the doors checking haha.  More motivation to get some non-members there with us, right?  Way excited for Conference.  It seems like just last week I was in the MTC gym watching it on the huge projector, and now it´s back again.  Time is going quickly.

So I learned something interesting the other day.  Well not so much as learned something as I did put 2 things I already knew into one truth that I never really made the connection to before.  Of the many names that Christ has, one of them is "The Only Begotten" of the Father.  I never really thought about the significance of the name, because He has many names and I figured it was just another one.  It never really called my attention.  But then I got to thinking that all of us are children of our Heavenly Father - we are all begotten of Him.  So why is Christ called the Only Begotten?  I thought it had something to do with the Atonement or something like that, but it has a literal sense as well.  We are all sons and daughters of God, but we all have earthly parents (or parents of our bodies) as well.  For Christ, however, the Father is the father of His spirit and his body, and this trait is unique to Him and only Him.  Thus, He is the Only Begotten Son - in the flesh.  Really obvious if you think about it, but I thought it was pretty interesting.  I told my companion and he laughed because I just now made the connection haha.  It was funny.

Small World

BREAKING NEWS:  Summer has officially ended here in Paraguay!  According to the calender, yesterday was the last day of summer here.  ¡Por fin!

How´s everyone doing today?  Still sleeping, I´m sure.  It´s 11:14 am here, probably 6 or 7 there.  Here´s a nice Paraguayan email to wake up to!

This past week was pretty good.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  We have 2 people with baptism dates - a 14 year old boy for 3 of april and a 21 year old girl for 17 of april.  Keep your fingers crossed!  This week will be a little different.  Usually we have interviews with President Callan every change about the time we have zone conferences.  Usually our interviews are in Asunción in his office.  But this change, he and Hermana Callan are coming to every single pention in the mission to check it out and do interviews.  Yikes!  Needless to say, we have to do a little cleaning haha.  We don´t know what day or time he´s going to come, so we have to be ready.  Kind of exciting, that should be fun.

My First Confimation

Hey hey everybody!

So first of all, got some birthday shoutouts to do that I couldn´t do last week and that are coming this week.  HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO...
Great Grandpa!
Uncle Matt!
Aunt Jody!
Jabba Jake!
Love you guys and hope it was/will be great!

Now, Rick and Cindy, I have a job for you.  There´s a guy here in Asunción that makes special custom leather scripture cases.  I need you guys to find out about Bryce´s scriptures he´ll be using in the field so I can get him some cases made.  What size will they be (other than standard, if they´re extra small or the old guy big kind) and if it´s a quad or the bible and a triple combination.  If you could have my parents email me the info (or you guys can email it to me) then I can get some made for him.  When they´re done I´ll send them to your house and you can send them to him, or you can send me the address to his mission home when you get it and I can send it straight to him.  Up to you!

Side note before I forget - this is my new email:  timothy.moore@myldsmail.net

God Lives!

God lives.

Do you want to know how I know that God lives?  I know because He answers prayers.  He watches us, helps us in ways we don´t always see or notice, and when we need it the very most, He steps in.  From my recent and rather dark experiences, I know this for fact.

I remember the story that Joe Watkins taught in Sunday School one week.  He was talking about the way silver was refined in the olden days.  This was the story:

To refine silver in the ancient times, a specific process was used.  The piece of silver is held in the fire for refining.  It was held in the center of the fire, in the hottest part of the flames.  But the person watching over this little piece of silver has to be very careful.  He cannot leave for even a few minutes or take his eyes off this tiny piece of silver.  Why is his committed attention so important?  If he takes the silver out of the flame too early or too late, it is ruined and cannot be fixed.  So how does the watchman know when the silver is ready to be taken out of the flames?  When the fire reaches its hottest point, the silver is perfectly refined when the watchman can see himself in the piece of silver.
So it is with our lives, and our Father in Heaven.  We are put into the refiner´s fire, tried, and pushed to our limits.  We have trials that sometimes seem to never end, and we feel completely and hopelessly engulfed in the flames.  But just when the fire is its hottest, just when our trials become unbareable, our watchman the Father sees a little bit of Himself inside of us and steps in not a moment too late to save us from the inferno.