Tjabba grabbar!
It's been a crazy couple of weeks. Christmas was pretty
awesome. We got to spend Christmas Eve with our branch mission leader and his
family which was a miracle because he was going to be working that day until a
few days before he was given the day off so he invited us over. Otherwise we
wouldn't have had anywhere to go and we would've celebrated by ourselves in the
apartment which would have been way less fun. That was certainly an answer to
our prayers.
So in Sweden, they celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve with
the big meal and the presents under the tree and stuff and then they have
Christmas Day to kind of chill out and eat more food and visit with family, and
then they have what's called "annandag jul" which literally means
"another day of Christmas" on the 26th. Swedes really love their
holidays, let me tell you.
This week we were challenged by our mission president to
read the whole Book of Mormon in the week between Christmas Eve and New Years
Day. He gave us a couple of extra hours of study time a day to accomplish it so
we spent a good portion of our week reading and I finished on Saturday morning.
It was such an incredible experience. By reading the whole book so quickly, it
was so much easier to notice larger, more overarching patterns in the book than
when I had read a little bit every day. It was so cool to see how the testimony
of Christ developed line by line as successive prophets received new revelation
and built on top of what their predecessors had written. It's incredible to see
the difference between the first mention of the Messiah in 1 Nephi 10 and
Amulek's discourse on the atonement in Alma 34.
The whole experience has convinced me more than ever that
the Book of Mormon really is the word of God. That when Christ spoke of
"other sheep [he has] which are not of this fold," as he does in John
10:16, he meant very literally that there existed other people in the world who
had been receiving divine revelation concerning his birth, life, and death, and
whose records are contained in the Book of Mormon. I know it's true, and would
highly recommend any of you who have not read it to do so, and those who have,
to do so again.
Happy New Year!
Love,
Äldste Cummings
No comments:
Post a Comment