Hong Kong: HOPE CAN TOTALLY CHANGE OUR WAY OF THINKING

January 25, 2016

Family,

Thanks for the emails. Also, thank you for sending the sheet music and the card. I love that Blake said his own prayer. That's awesome. Hope all goes well with the surgery. That sounds brutal. I read some of the obedience talk you send me again. It's a great talk. Thanks so much. Its prompted some thinking and pondering and some changes. You expained everything so clearly. It always is remarkable to me how when we prepare by the spirit, the listeners will be more able to learn by the same spirit. But it makes perfect sense. When you are teaching by the spirit, you will be teaching to peoples needs and what they need to hear. Not only that, I believe when the things you say are what the Lord would have you say, then they are more clear and complete, allowing the spirit to testify of their truthfulness. This in turn leads people to want to change, because of what they heard and more importantly what they felt.

Our investigators are doing well. Zheng is off to mainland for the chinese new year and won't be back till the 18th. I'm worried all of our investigators are going to leave, so it might be a slow next few weeks.

We met with A-zheng and had a great lesson. One of the members and her are really good friends and she is exercising a lot of faith. It is exciting.

Met with Liu DX and tried to give him a book of Mormon, but he refused it.

I am learning more about hope lately, and that is a pretty amazing aspect of the gospel, that we can have this hope which can totally change our way of thinking and our perspective to one of enthusiasm, optimism, confidence and patient perserverence. In Chinese the word for perspective is muguang. the guang means light. so by having this hope, we have more light in our eyes, we can see more clearly and our future looks more brilliant. That's a pretty amazing blessing.

Love,

Elder Josh Stratford