Happy Easter!

Hey all,

Man, you sure worry about my packages mom. :) it literally came the day after p-day, like I thought it would. Thank you for it all, you’re great. Funny note too. Elder Benson liked his stuff too.

Sounds like your Easter was a whole lot more fun than mine was, haha. We didn’t do anything too crazy. Since we work in the YSA branch everyone’s a dirt poor student who can’t really afford to feed us a bunch, so we didn’t eat with anyone or anything. Plus we did some service during dinner time, so people couldn’t really feed us. I did want to make something better than normal, so I started making Alfredo chicken, when I realized we didn’t have any flour. The only thing we had I could use was pancake mix, so we had pancake mix chicken Alfredo. Not my finest dish, and sure makes for a lame Easter dinner. 

Church was nice though, we had a less active come to church. Her name is Alexa, she is from Toronto, has a brother on a mission, and is going to school here, and basically ever since she’s been away from home she’s been doing whatever she wants—she never got church or why it was important, so she never came. So we taught her this week and talked about if she wanted to know if these things were true, and she said she’d start learning, so it’s been nice to see that. We’re not teaching any investigators yet, though we do have several potentials we’ve received that are promising. 

We also had exchanges with the Moncton elders, which was lots of fun, it was great to be with Elder Holman again. We also made some totes to keep all of the zone conference materials in, because the assistants aren’t going to go to all the zone conferences anymore, the zone leaders are going to be in charge of setting it up now. And we want to make sure all the expensive equipment we have stays safe, because we have a lapel microphone, table microphones, and a projector for both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. So we put it all together and looked for a good tote, turns out the measurements they take for the totes are diagonal, so that was super unhelpful to buy the perfect size and learn that it was way too small. Oh Canada. 

Saturday was probably the most interesting day of my week. We did an Easter themed booth with the district downtown. We got downtown and found the earlier set of missionaries running it all standing in the corners of our tent thingy, because the wind was so bad it would pick it up and blow it into the street if we didn’t. And a different church started setting up their Easter street concert right behind us, so when we had about an hour left, everyone started jamming out. Their church was called the JesusHouse. It was pretty fun.

No I didn’t get to see the video [of the plans for the Salt Lake Temple renovation], but I heard a bit about it. I know it’s closing December, but not much more. I saw a few pictures about what they’re doing and it looks super cool, but I don’t know much. 

It’ll be p-day as usual till transfer week, then I’ll have part of it on Tuesday and part on Wednesday (May 7th and 8th).

Something I’ve been thinking about lately (again, I can never remember if I’ve already talked about this, just ignore me if I have) is the connection between sacrifice and love. Christ taught that no man hath greater love than he layeth down his life for his friends. I think he’s basically telling us if we want to love someone, if we want charity, we need to sacrifice for them. Mothers are willing to give up so much for their kids, and they really love them. We show our love to God by a lot of sacrifice. We sacrifice money, time, skills, etc. and give it to the Lord, and when we do, we show love for others and God. I think it’s particularly apparent in missionary work. Ammon and his brothers weren’t called to go to the Lamanites. They asked to go, because they loved their brothers. Enos wasn’t asked to pray for the Lamanites. But he loved them and sacrificed a half day or more in prayer for them. The centurion didn’t have to go to Jesus to heal his servant, he did it because he loved his servant. It’s not enough just to love God and try to follow him—if we want charity, we need to sacrifice, to give “even to the least of these my brethren” something valuable (i.e. the gospel). And when we do, we are filled with Christ’s love. It’s a pretty good trade, because when we give all that we have, we also receive all that Christ has. There're a lot of really good talks about it on gospel library, check it out.

Anyway, love you all. Have a great week! Love,

Elder Marsh