Two Weeks of News

December 17, 2012

Hey :)

I hope this week was full of wonderful Christmas preparations and celebrations, and for those in school, you know who you are :), I hope that  it wasn`t too stressfull towards the end.

This week was wonderful.  Here is a gallery of the birthday party we threw for Daniel our recent convert who turned 30, and the P-day trip to Cerro Santa Lucia we took today.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fovzysxwbxxfvvj/FcdjMYstmp

On Sunday, Danny prepared, blessed, and then cleaned up the Sacrement.  It was great to see him already participating with his Priesthood Authority.  Roberto is preparing to go through the temple.  A great feat considering his 3 months of membership, but necessary because of special circumstances.  He`s doing well spiritually.  

I`m loving being in this ward.  While the sector is a little challenging, we`re still having significant success, with a baptism planned next week.  In my free time I enjoy music, writing, and reading articles on doctrine.  We`re having wonderful success with the English class.  I love teaching it, and we have an average of 16 people coming.  

Next week will obviously be Christmas themed, and I could love if you could send me your favorite christmas poem or holiday story.

Thanks so much for your love and support.

Y preparate para el Viajito Pascuero

Tu Missionero

Elder Parry Harrison

December 10, 2012

Hey :)

This week has been great.  We`re helping several in-actives to return to activity.  Also we have a wonderful person named Antonieta that is progressing towards her baptism.  We`ve had some wonderful family home evenings with her.  Some interesting facts.  80% of the stake lidership comes from this ward.  And if someone know English and Spanish they can communicate with 80% of the church and with Portugese 90%.  This week we had the amazing opportunity to have a tour of the mission with Elder Zaballos.  He`s the first counselor in the area presidency and a member of the first quorm of the 70.  It was an impactful multi-zone conference.  And, aftwards my district ate at his table with him, his wife, and President and Sister Essig.  He gave a talk in conference this last year I believe, and gave us some interesting behind the scenes.  We`re planning a Christmas Celebration with all those in the ward who live alone and don`t have any to celebrate the season with.  It`ll probably be in the chapel with the bishop`s family.

Great Speeches This Week:

Unless You're a Mormon

http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=862

One Convert at a Time

http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=234

There is nothing I have ever done to this point of my life easier than missionary work. Physically and mentally it was demanding—even draining at times. However, the process of conversion was the easiest thing I have ever been associated with, and that is because I had nothing to do with it. I did nothing. It was the Spirit which worked that great change in the hearts of so many wonderful people. [Anthony Grover, Missionary Homecoming Address, Grove Ward, Pleasant Grove Stake, June 1998]

This Nation Shall Endure

http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1004

Said Webster, "They poured out their generous blood like water before they knew whether it would fertilize the land of freedom or of bondage."

But they aroused their fellow Americans. Within one year John Adams faced the body of men who were deliberating on whether to adopt the Declaration of Independence. With the inspiration of heaven resting on him, Adams was said to have declared:

Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there's a Divinity which shapes our ends. . . . Why, then, should we defer the Declaration? . . . You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to the time when this Declaration shall be made good. We may die; die Colonists, die slaves, die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold.

Be it so. Be it so.

If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready. . . . But while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country.

But whatever may be our fate, be assured . . . that this Declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood; but it will stand and it will richly compensate for both.

All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it; and I leave off as I began, that live or die, survive or perish, I am for the Declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, Independence now, and Independence forever. [The Works of Daniel Webster,4th ed., 1:133–:36]

Theology and Technology

http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=261

As we consider technology and theology, it is interesting that many of our Church leaders believe that technology has come as a direct result of inspiration from the Lord. In general conference in October 1926, Elder Joseph Fielding Smith stated the following:

I maintain that had there been no restoration of the gospel, and no organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there would have been no radio; there would have been no airplane, and there would not have been the wonderful discoveries in medicine, chemistry, electricity, and the many other things wherein the world has been benefited by such discoveries. Under such conditions these blessings would have been withheld, for they belong to the Dispensation of the Fulness of Times of which the restoration of the gospel and the organization of the Church constitute the central point, from which radiates the Spirit of the Lord throughout the world. The inspiration of the Lord has gone out and takes hold of the minds of men, though they know it not, and they are directed by the Lord. In this manner he brings them into his service that his purposes and his righteousness, in due time, may be supreme on the earth.

[CR, October 1926, 117]

Of course, doing and work require action and application. We won't accomplish much by just thinking about it. President Hinckley noted that "our pioneer forebears could never plow a field by turning it over in their minds" (Standing, 80).

Photos from the last couple of things:

the end is from a christmas celebration with Celia a wonderful convert from May.  And the paintings I did.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l147ctekrxaagtb/wzO2NUX1ss

Tu Missionero
Elder Parry Harrison

Inspiration

Hey :)

Quick update about the week.  Another change with Elder Licea, here in Compañia - the Center.  I`m still DL.  Now Roberto is the Executive Secretary.  The photos of the little girls from the link a couple of weeks ago are twins (non identical) that I met on the bus a couple of weeks ago.  They were going to an amusement park with their dad.  They're 5 too :)  I've been teaching an English Class of about 20 students for the last several weeks.  I`ve been enjoying it and we`ve already found 4 new investigators through the class.

Now a collection of excerpts from recent inspirational talks I`ve read:

Hugh Nibley & Joseph Smith

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/?vol=19&num=1&id=504

A young man once long ago claimed he had found a large diamond in his field as he was ploughing. He put the stone on display to the public free of charge, and everyone took sides. A psychologist showed, by citing some famous case studies, that the young man was suffering from a well-known form of delusion. An historian showed that other men have also claimed to have found diamonds in fields and been deceived. A geologist proved that there were no diamonds in the area but only quartz: the young man had been fooled by a quartz. When asked to inspect the stone itself, the geologist declined with a weary, tolerant smile and a kindly shake of the head. An English professor showed that the young man in describing his stone used the very same language that others had used in describing uncut diamonds: he was, therefore, simply speaking the common language of his time. A sociologist showed that only three out of 177 florists' assistants in four major cities believed the stone was genuine. A clergyman wrote a book to show that it was not the young man but someone else who had found the stone.

Finally an indigent jeweler named Snite pointed out that since the stone was still available for examination the answer to the question of whether it was a diamond or not had absolutely nothing to do with who found it, or whether the finder was honest or sane, or who believed him, or whether he would know a diamond from a brick, or whether diamonds had ever been found in fields, or whether people had ever been fooled by quartz or glass, but was to be answered simply and solely by putting the stone to certain well-known tests for diamonds. Experts on diamonds were called in. Some of them declared it genuine. The others made nervous jokes about it and declared that they could not very well jeopardize their dignity and reputations by appearing to take the thing too seriously. To hide the bad impression thus made, someone came out with the theory that the stone was really a synthetic diamond, very skilfully made, but a fake just the same. The objection to this is that the production of a good synthetic diamond 120 years ago would have been an even more remarkable feat than the finding of a real one.

We have never been very much interested in "proving" the Book of Mormon; for us its divine provenance has always been an article of faith, and its historical aspects by far the least important thing about it.

Nibley believed the Book of Mormon was a diamond that could cut glass. It slashed through the falsities of modern materialism and humbled the mighty to the dust. The book and its message meant everything to him. The ploughboy prophet, much as Nibley may have loved him, was subordinated to his precious find in the field.

Tracking down references to Joseph Smith in the indexes of Nibley's collected works, I found the largest concentration in the reprint of a talk Nibley gave at the Sunstone Symposium in 1989 on "Criticizing the Brethren."  It is the only place I know of where Joseph comes to center stage, and we finally get a view of Nibley's thoughts about the man. He called in Joseph on this occasion to address an issue that frequently troubles intellectuals: how to deal with criticism of church leaders. Nibley used Joseph Smith both as a model of an authority—the first among the Brethren—and also as the target of criticism. Nibley tries to show how Joseph operated in each of these roles, leader and target, as an example for modern church leaders and modern church members. The point he wanted to make was that Joseph was constantly under attack from lesser men who did not value him, but his reaction was not to get upset. He rolled with the punches. Joseph was open, free, and searching, and he allowed all men the same privilege. He was inclined to leave evil to the Lord rather than cracking down.

 I was interested to find that the Joseph Smith in this essay was an expanded version of the ploughboy that Snite defended. Nibley portrays Joseph as the simple innocent, assaulted by scornful, arrogant, and ultimately unknowing critics. Joseph Smith did not lay claim to high intellect or worldly might, Nibley reminds us. He simply reported what had happened to him. "He spoke only of what he had seen with his eyes, heard with his ears, and felt with his hands."  And yet, he stumped them all. Nibley let Brigham Young drive home the point. "The whole Christian doctrine, as Brigham Young put it, 'simmered down . . . into a snuffbox, . . . but, when I found "Mormonism," I found that it was higher than I could reach, . . . deeper than I was capable of comprehending and calculated to expand the mind . . . from truth to truth, from light to light, . . . to become associated with the Gods and angels.' "  Nibley loved for the simple and plain to outfox the clever and wise. He spent his life showing how the ploughboy surpassed them all.

Today I would like to share with you several powerful and true accounts of magnanimous acts and liken them to what the Savior taught. I hope that through these examples we might be able to consider how we can magnify this characteristic in our lives. I should mention that in an engineering ethics class that I teach, one of the assignments given is for each class member to take a personal value, such as magnanimity, and try living it completely for a week. The result of this assignment generally provides a new awareness of the positive effects of incorporating such ideals in our lives. You might consider such an assignment today as an experiment on magnanimity.

The first story is an inspiring illustration of true forgiveness and an example of being raised far above revenge. It seems that the elements of war often provide the grounds for magnanimous actions. This story took place in the course of the atrocities of war when an enemy soldier pursued a young civilian woman and her brother down a street. The siblings became cornered in an angle of a wall, and the brother was slain before his sister's eyes. She subsequently dodged down an alley, leaped a wall, and escaped. Later captured, and having been trained as a nurse, she was forced by the enemy authorities to work in a military hospital. Into her ward was brought, one day, the same soldier who had slain her brother. He was very ill. A slight inattention on the nurse's part would insure his death. The young woman faced a bitter struggle in her mind. Vengeance was a powerful conviction, as was the impression of love. In the end, the better side of her conquered, and she nursed him as carefully as any other patient in the ward. The soldier had recognized the young lady as well, and, one day, being unable to restrain his curiosity, he asked his nurse why she had not let him die. She respectfully replied to him, "I am a follower of him who said 'Love your enemies and do them good.'" This statement caused the soldier to ponder the situation for a long time. At last he responded to her, "I never knew that there was such a religion. If that is your religion tell me more about it, for I want it." (Story paraphrased from Harry Emerson Fosdick, Twelve Tests of Character [New York: Association Press, 1941], pp. 166–67.)

The young nurse truly had adequate reason to at least have some other person administer medical help to the young soldier. But she understood what the Savior taught about forgiveness of enemies. In the story's end we see the beginning of another story. The follow-up story would likely result in a new direction for the life of the soldier. His life would likely be directed toward goodness, service, and love for mankind. It would be a life where he would delight in doing good. Thus we get a glimpse of the result of magnanimous actions. They not only allow good to be done on a one-on-one basis but open the door, by example and precept, for additional magnanimous actions.

The next story, which is equally instructive, is an episode in the life of the distinguished Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
When Robert E. Lee was a cadet at West Point, a classmate took a violent and irrational dislike to him. The animosity persisted into later life. For many years this fellow officer made malicious attacks on Lee. One day a mutual acquaintance asked Lee what he thought of this individual. To the questioner's surprise, Lee spoke in the highest terms of him. Then his questioner said slyly, "I guess you don't know what he's been saying about you for years." "You have not asked me," Lee replied, "for his opinion of me. You have asked me for my opinion of him." [As related by James G. Gilkey in Stanley I. Stuber and Thomas Curtis Clark, eds., Treasury of the Christian Faith: An Encyclopedic Handbook of the Range and Witness of Christianity (New York: Association Press, 1949), pp. 775–76

Magnifying Magnamity

http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=919

There is a couple of the recent reads.  There will be more forthcoming...

Elder Parry Harrison