February 17, 2014 "Tough Times"

February 17, 2014

We have been teaching this lady who is a long time member but her and

her husband haven't been coming to church for awhile and she has had a
lot of questions that she couldn't get answered. She just read through
the Old Testament for the first time and now feels like she is ready
to finish the Book of Mormon for the first time. We just finished
1 Nephi and are starting on 2 Nephi. She is seeing so much on how the
Old Testament is helping her understand the Book of Mormon and the
Book of Mormon is helping her understand the Old Testament. It is
really cool how the 2 can help and support each other. Now we just
need to help her and her husband see the importance of coming to church.

We taught another other lesson to a family that has had a tough time this

past year. Their year first started off by coming down to AZ to help a grandma
through cancer and turned into a longer stay than normal. Towards the
end of it their oldest son committed suicide that left a big scar on
everyone. The parents asked all of the siblings to come home and help
out so they all did and put life on hold for a year. To add to the
death of their son, at the funeral their grandfather died. So the family
was traumatized and attributed their not coming to church as their way of
getting through this tough time. I have knocked on their door for 9 months
and no one has answered until now. We felt prompted to talk
about the commandment of the Sabbath Day along with the sacrament. The
concern that the father had was that when he was 16 he read everything
on the church and now when he goes to church he is bored because he
has heard it all. He says that he doesn't feel the Holy
Ghost at all. We talked about if you go to a meeting with a question in
mind that you can always be learning something from the spirit and he
just expressed more of his frustration with not feeling the Holy
Ghost. He is stubborn but I think we know how we can help him in his
challenges and his questions.

I have learned that when it comes to letters that it is easiest to

write them when you make a list of what you would like to say,
As you can see I did not make a list this time around. But next time I will.
There is an Elder that we live with that hurt his knee while coming home
Saturday night and is now out of commission so we are all changing our schedule to help.

Sincerely Elder Leonhardt