General Conference & Dogs 4/3/17

Bowling with the district up

What an amazing week, I loved Conference! Wasn't Elder Clayton's talk so amazing! It was so fun to see him talk, it reminded me so much of all of our conferences we had when he was in the mission. I can really see how he has taken on the mantel of a Special Witness of Christ. He's obviously the same person, but at the same time he has a special look in his eye as well. The rest of conference I loved, how blessed we were to hear from President Monson about the Book of Mormon and the importance of reading it daily. One of my favorite talks was Elder Hales as he talked about Discipleship, and how discipleship isn't just doing the things Christ did, but a lot more, it's a "State of being". While listening and thinking about that I had a thought come to my mind, but the words "Our focus should be to become like Christ, not just be like Christ." Now, as I thought about these words I realized what it meant exactly. We can do good things in our life which is good, but more importantly we need to become like Christ, in how we think and act, and in our desires and motives. 

The day before conference started, we all got to go to the temple, oh my! It was amazing to be in the house of the Lord. I got to do the temple work for Claude Hook who is one of Papa Jac's cousins! It was awesome, our session started at 7, so in order to do all the work beforehand we had to get up at 4am so we could be at the temple by 6, we were exhausted by the end to say the least! 

Super cool experience from this week, after the temple the Chinese Elders got a text from a girl named Karen, she wanted to meet up, so they passed her number on to us. We ended up meeting with her the next day. She met with missionaries close to 4 years ago in Toronto when she was doing a world religion project on the church and she knows practically everything about the church. We were talking about the Book of Mormon and when I mentioned Moroni she asked "Is that the same Moroni that lead Joseph Smith to the plates?" Hahaha, I'm sure my face was priceless when she said that. Anyhow, she came out to General Conference, really enjoyed it, had tons of questions, and we're meeting up with her again tomorrow. It's really cool to see how the Lord prepares people, last week for FHE, everybody shared their conversion stories, and with every one of them, the Lord had been preparing them years beforehand. 

So for the first session of Conference we watched it with Rachel, our New convert. The second session we drove out to St. Catharine's to watch it with Emily, one of the members out there, before the session we stopped by a Doughnut place called Beechwood Doughnuts. Basically they are the best doughnuts you'll ever have, I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to Tim Horton's for a doughnut without being disappointed. I had a Strawberry Rhubarb doughnut, if you're ever passing through St. Catharine's, stop in to Beechwood, you won't regret. Priesthood we headed back to Hamilton to watch it here with some members! Sunday morning we watched in Hamilton with Karen, and then afterwards Elder Spencer had to do a Baptismal Interview, so while he did that I taught Karen, usually with Baptismal Interviews the one not doing the interview just has to sit and wait. It was the best to actually have someone to teach while doing it. After that we drove out to Grimsby where we watched conference with the Hobbs, they go to Stoney Creek ward and are awesome! They feed us every week, and we've gotten super close to their family. After conference we had dinner with their family and headed back to Hamilton to finish off the night with some good old tracting.. It was an awesome weekend. 

We also hit up this sweet Hot dog shop called Alderbrook's in Burlington I use to eat at over a year ago. Sweet place, cheap 12' fully loaded hot dogs. Enough said.

I love the Gospel, we have modern prophets, Jesus Christ Lives!

Love you,

Elder Taylor

 

 Pho with Efe