The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
What an amazing week of serving in the vineyard of the Lord! As always, there's miracles to be shared, lessons learned and resolutions made. I hope you can say the same about your week.
Last week we met with one of the members here. He was telling us that he didn't really feel welcome in the ward because nobody came up and said hi to him. We read over the story of Jesus after he heard that John the Baptist died, and invited him to turn his loneliness into opportunities to love the other lonely members of our ward. We did something wrong, because it went right over his head. So I'll encourage y'all to turn outwards instead of inwards when you're going through a hard time.
We met with one of the friendliest families in San Diego this week. She has a young daughter who needs a lot of medical attention, so she's been jumping place to place, trying to find a good place to single-handedly raise her family. When she got here, our Elders Quorum president immediately reached out and mobilized the ward members to put together furniture and help out with her kids. If this isn't a Zion community, I don't know what is!
On Friday, my companion and I went over to the Mormon Battalion to stream a jazz devotional. It was so much fun seeing a little piece of my past mixed with the present. It's on Facebook if y'all want to watch the recording.
It's been my job to set up the cameras and computer equipment for these events since about last July. I've done it so many times, and yet, things still happen to go wrong. This time as I set up, though, I went in with a prayer. I knew things were going to go wrong, something was going to break, so I asked God to help me know how to find and solve the problems when they arise.
And arise they did. I spent many hours running between cameras, changing cords out, pressing buttons and pulling my hair out. As the time to live got closer and closer, I knew that I had to rely on God. I got up on the picnic table that we had equipment on so I could look at everything. While up there, the stories of the Saints that had trekked down to San Diego came into my mind. I remembered the sacrifices and Miracles in their journeys, and I knew that whatever happened that night would be God's will.
I immediately knew which cameras to sacrifice for the good of the rest of them and threw non-functional equipment back in the bags. I had as many cameras operating as possible with the current problems.
Having that done, I pulled out my phone to start setting up the close-up cameras and saw a notification. It said that my DNS server couldn't be reached. I immediately texted my parents asking them to reset it, knowing that a reset had fixed it every time before. They give me a call and tell me that all the power in Utah was out. Trusting God, I put the close-up cams away and just let the show happen.
It was a beautiful performance, everything was so perfect. I don't know what the outcome of this performance was, and I won't until the next life. But I can have faith and a trust in God that the outcome of this night was what my Heavenly Father required.
This week in my personal study, I read about Ammon and his reunion with Alma and the bois. It says in Alma 27:18 that Ammon was so happy, that he fell to the Earth. The narrator describes Ammon as a 'humble seeker of happiness'. What is it that Ammon does to qualify him as a seeker of happiness and what can I do to replicate that? I'm sure that everyone on the face of this planet feels a lack of happiness at one time or another, so we can learn a lot from examining the lives of people who have achieved said status.
As I pondered this question during sacrament meeting, it came to me that I need to be applying the scriptures daily and making sacrament a meaningful experience weekly. If I'm reading the scriptures every day just to check a box, or going to church just to fulfill a requirement, that is insane! Doing the same thing over and over again in hopes that it will make me more like our Savior is insane. So I've made a resolution to make my study and my worship more meaningful by going into each of them with the question, "so what?". What am I going to take away from today?
Whelp, this is the end of the email! I hope that y'all can be a humble seeker of happiness this week. Go make a resolution ;)
On to eternal perfection
-- Elder Coxson
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