Thanksgiving - week 16

Xiawu Hao everybody!

First off Happy Thanksgiving!! I am so grateful for every one of you! You have all been such great friends to me in my life, and of course so grateful for my amazing family! Love you all so much, and gratfeul for the examples you have been to me. This Thanksgiving was so great! We all got 3 hours together as a zone, and we had assigned different things to cook for the meal. Fortunately we have a pretty talented zone here so the cooking was really quite good, and this great couple got us a turkey and some pumpkin pie!

Elder Ma and Ryan cooking for Thanksgiving

Zone Thanksgiving feast

Which was such a blessing I have no idea where they got it. Porbably from one of the casinos. The activity was super fun! The Macau zone is really great and tight, we are all really isolated from the rest of the mission on our little island, so everyone is a like a big family! I really love it! Thanksgiving was also probably my biggest feeling of home sickness I have had so far, it was pretty brutal, then I heard this Elder, who didn't have the best home life before say that he wished he could have a good enough home to feel homesick about. I felt so bad! And it made me immediately switch attitudes, from the sort of self pity, to gratitude. Thanksgiving should be a day of gratitude!

Macau Zone

But really everyday should be. I felt so so grateful and blessed to have such great family and home who have built around the gospel of Christ. Truly that is the surest way to having a happy home life. I am so blessed to have two faifthul and dedicated parents. I'm grateful and blessed to have my amazing friends who

Ryan's District

support me, and a lot of whom are also out serving the Lord! I am so grateful for this missionary experience. i can't really put into words my gratitude for this opportunity to serve God, and to get to wear the name of Christ on the chest everyday and be recognized everywhere I go as a Christian, and someone who is serving. I am grateful for the knowledge that we all have a loving Heavanly Father. He does exist, and he does know us. I know it. I can really say that I know it. And I am supremely grateful for my SAvior Jesus Christ. He suffered unimaginable pain for us, so that we don't have to. He paid a debt he didn't have to for us, because we had no way to. There is no greater example, no greater, more selfless or moral being that has ever lived than he. My mission president, President Lam is so amazing. He was here in Macau a little while ago and talked about the enabling power of the atonemnt. I am so grateful for that enabling power of Christ's atonement. It allows us to really change, to truly be producers of our circumstances, rather than products of our circumstances. That is one of the greatest lessons I have learned out here as I have taught people and as I have run my own life out here, we will often complain and blame circtumstances for our results, our inaction, or really anything else that we find unsatisfactory, but in the end we are just being products. But the best thing is that we can be more than that, we can be producers of our circumstances! The best way to be able to do so is by allowing ourselves to believe in Christ, relying on him, and allowing his grace, the enabling power of his atonement, to enter into our lives, giving us more self reliance to take hold of ourselves, and be what we have always wanted to be.

 

One of the best examples of this is this less active member we have been meeting a lot with here, named Kirbi. We got to meet his mother from the Phillippines the other day, and it was one of the best blessings of my mission. She came to us in tears, saying she couldn't believe the change in her son, kept asking is this my son? For awhile he would always blame work making him too tired for church, and his schedule (which is a really tough schedule), but as he met with us and we taught him of the atonement, and of his Savior, he started to access that enabling power. He started to really change himself. He stopped blaming his schedule. He started doing things of his own volition, reading, praying, pondering, searching, through Christ  he started producing the happiness that he had been missing and wanted again. I know that Christ's gospel changes. It gives people power and motivation and happiness that nothing else can give. It's given me more of that than any other single thing in my life.

 

 To his mother the change was so very apparent. She said we were helping answer years of prayers. I was so moved by her, and she said something that really struck me, she said 'never forget my son.' It made me think of Hollands talk about mothers, they will never forget their children, and made me think of what Heavenly Father pleads from us as well, that we never forget His Son. However God pleads that we will never forget His Son because in remembering Him we are strengthened, forgiven, and may have His Spirit to be with us. It was a great moment where I really felt again I was doing the missionary purpose, and allowing God to use us to answer prayers.

We were able to visit the sister who had brain surgery last week as well, she had a tumor removed from the back of her brain and a lot of liquid drained out of her brain that had gathered up, she is recovering miraculously quickly and should be out of the hosopital soon!

The Lord answers prayers!

Her whole experience is absolutely miraculous, my last email couldn't even begin to do that day justice. She has one of the best attitudes of anyone I have ever met, just so positive and grateful even in such a scary and hard trial. And her trust in the blessing was amazing, and it is showing in her miraculously fast recovery. Everyone is shocked at her progress. Her gratefullness reminds me of what this old pioneer said when people were criticizing the hand cart company that he came over the plains in (he was in the martin hadn cart company which ran into an early winter where lots of people died of exposure, sickness, starvation etc on the plains) and he said he never regretted that decision during, or after because in those extremeties he truly got to know God. Amazing attitudes of gratitude. I love this mission so much, I feel as though I learn 1000 lessons a week and I hope I am retaining all of them. This was the best decision I have made in my life, though it has not been easy so far, I am gratfeul for the hard times because I have grown and learned so much, I have had to rely on the Lord, not on myself. I have prayed harder than I ever had before. I have felt the true power that is prayer, that it really really is communication with God. I have cried a lot haha, tears of stress, dissappointment, sadness, laughter, excitement, and joy. I am so grateful to God for serving here. My heart has felt fuller here than any other time in my life. These things and feelings I know are not from me.

 

I have a big testimony of gratitude! Every time I feel bad I just think about everything I am grateful for and then I just get overwhelmed with just how much I am grateful for! I hope everyone is thinking of everything they have been blessed with espeically in this Thanksgiving season! 

Love you all!

 

Elder Woolley

It's mid 60's - I think Ryan has become a cold wimp!
He's dressed for winter! hahaha