Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Letter 03-04-2014

It's weird to think that in Arkansas it's snowy and icy and cold because it's been such a mild, nice, 50-degree February this month in Utah. We're getting a lot of rain so we'll have something to drink out here during the summer. That's good. If the rain would go away it'd be nice frisbee weather

I went on exchanges this week with Elder Miller last week in the Little Cottonwood stake. It was fun to go back and see the people that I used to work with. Elder Hodge and Miller are working with a lot of the people that I was trying to get in with a year ago. One of the most fun things was randomly running into an inactive we were working with who was returning to church and is going to the temple to get her endowments out this month!

Also went on exchanges with Elder Wilson... felt prompted to knock a door we thought would be members, but saw cigarettes in the pot outside. They invited us right in and said they're good friends with our ward mission leader and were coming to church Sunday. They actually came... and we found out to everyone's surprise that he's not a member. There are so many dry mormons out here. We'll be teaching them the stop smoking program on Thursday and set a baptism date with him. We reported seven with a baptism date last week. It's so busy right now!

So things are going well!
Elder Chandler
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thought: unignorable

In Elders quorum last week in one of our wards (Shawn Bradley is in the ward and in this elders quorum) (Sister Burton the general relief society president is also in our area) one of the elders made a cool comment about our church being unignorable. What a cool thought to me!

Although I don't exactly have a lot of access to the news, there's one thing about the gay rights activity going on that has always fascinated me. The gay population has always been there, and it's always sat at about the same percent of the population. Why didn't this issue surface years ago? And yet here it is, now, and everyone at this point is forced to take one side or the other in an emotionally-charged, divisive, overdue subject matter that's plastered all over the media in ugly colors. 

To me, the church is going to have to go through the same "refiners fire". Whether the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be is going to be the center of speculation, of media attention, of emotion. Here over 200 years since its publication though, we're running on just as much about scientific evidence as we've gathered about the hormones that cause homosexuality - we're trying to put together a 1000 piece puzzle with 2 or 3 pieces in both cases. People will place and spin those couple pieces over and over, but in the end the evidence can never be conclusive. Just as in homosexuality, the church debate will be centered on, not the issue itself, but the conflicting and man-made puzzle pieces created to fill in the gaps.

And everyone will be polarized to one side of the issue. And everyone must decide to find out for themselves whether the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, by the only source they can truly find out - by asking God Himself. And it is true!--

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