Hong Kong: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELDER STRATFORD

October 30, 2016

Family,

Good busy week as always. I think there is a correlation there.

Li JM brought a family member from Shenzhen to church on Sunday. She is doing great.

WangLe is doing good. The ward is taking good care of him. He is starting to learn how to do Family History.

Zhang JM is doing good. She doesnt have too big of a receptical, so we can only pour in a little at a time. It fills up fast. That is fine though. We just need to be careful that we don't keep pouring and get her all wet. She is praying on her own for the first time ever. Pretty awesome.

My time in the New Territories is coming to an end. Found out I am moving. Don't know where yet. It has been a long time. Over 1 year. It's been great. What an awesome place with awesome people.

Been doing a lot of practice teaching this week. It is good to practice more.

Temple last Friday. It was awesome as always. Since Mission Tour and Temple I can't stop thinking about treasuring up. As I am treauring up more it is making my personal studies better.

Quick thought from personal study this morning. since I have been thinking a lot about this. D&C 11:21 teaches us that if we obtain the word our tongue will be loosed and if we desire we will have the spirit and thew ord unto the convincing of men. Convincing in the footnotes is conversion. It is no wonder PMG tells us that teh Spirit and the Book of Mormon areour most powerful tools in conversion. All of this relies on obtaining the word. How do we obtain the word?

The footnote on obtain takes us to Alma 17:2 "they had searched the scriptures diligently." So we obtain by searching the scripture diligently. I took Elder Huang (Of the Seventy) advice and looked at the Chinese because he told us that learning Chinese will help us learning English. He was kind of kidding, but mostly serious. The Chinese word for search is 查考. The 查 character means to check, examine or inspect. The 考 character means to give or take a test, study or investigate. In other words, search means to closely examine the scriptures and apply what you are learning, thus testing the word or experimenting on the word.

PMG teaches us that studying diligently is steady, consistant, earnest, energetic, persistant, and with great effort and care. It is not casual. It requires work. President Lam explained this process of obtaining pretty simply in the last Mission Leadership Meeting: Learn it. Love it. Live it.

There are a million blessing from doing this, but I am out of time to share them. I will just share one from Elder Benson. He said something like, 'As we feast on the words of Christ we will find life in greater and greater abundance.' I testify that that is true.

Elder Josh Stratford 施長老