(Aldste Cummings)
Hello all!
This week was crazy. We were traveling a TON to go on
splits, go to district meeting, and Elder Cluff had to go to Stockholm for some
meetings while I stayed behind with the Jönköping elders. All in all, we
weren't able to spend a lot of time in Skövde this week which was kind of sad
because it was my last week in the area.
Transfer calls came last night, and I'll be moving tomorrow
to Karlskrona to replace Elder Wayment, my good friend from the MTC. It's a
beautiful city right on the southern coast of Sweden. My companion will be
Elder Harris who trained another one of my good friends from the MTC, Elder
Francis. I'm super excited. Especially because I'll probably be down there for
the upcoming summer and I hear the city will be down-right gorgeous.
A funny/incredible thing that happened this week was that
while we were in Jönköping, the elders there gave us their blender for free
because Elder Cluff and I have been really wanting a blender for a while now.
So after church the next day we decided to use our new blender to make a
delicious berries and cream smoothie for lunch. We added in all the ingredients
and started the blender up but after a couple seconds the blades stopped
running and the blender started smoking. We took off the jar thing to see that the
rotator that the jar sat on which would spin the blades was made of a soft
rubber which wore away until the teeth that latched on to the blades were
completely gone and it could no longer make the blades spin.
So now we were sitting at our kitchen staring at the jar
full of unblended berries and cream with our mouths watering. After a couple
minutes of lamentation, we began trying to find things we could put over the
rotator to make it thick enough to attach to the blades. Balloons and rubber
bands both burned off when we turned the blender on. But then we had an
incredible idea. We took the aluminum cap off of a bottle of glögg (a Swedish
Christmas drink) and used pliers to mold it to cover the rotator as well as fit
the blade component. After about ten minutes of trial and error, we made fit!
Now the blender works as good as new and the smoothies tasted all the better
for it. Moral of the story: Where there is a will, there's a way.
Anyway, I chose the scripture I did this week not
particularly because of anything that happened this week, but rather just that
I think it is a powerful reminder of the negative effects of sin and the
realness of the urgency to turn to the Lord. Spoken to his more rebellious sons
very soon before he passed away, Lehi admonishes them to do five things:
"Awake" from their intentional passiveness, "put on the armor of
righteousness," "Shake off" the chains of sin that bind them,
"come forth out of obscurity," and "arise from the dust."
Each of these teach us something different about what sin is and what it does
to us. Lehi teaches us 1) that passively living or intentionally ignoring the
word of God is sinful and that we must awake to God 2) that sin leaves us
defenseless and we arm ourselves with righteousness 3) that sin binds us and
restricts us from our full potential 4) that sin darkens our view and disallows
us from seeing clearly and 5) that by forsaking sin, we arise to a higher plane
of existence. Profound and multifaceted council from a loving parent.
Have a great week!
Love,
Äldste Cummings
1. The bottle cap in the blender
2. Last selfie with Elder Cluff :(
3. The smoothies
