"There Could Not Be A Happier People Among All The People Who Had Been Created By The Hand Of God" - 4 Nephi 1:16

Hi friends!

This week I finished 3 Nephi and 4 Nephi in my Book of Mormon scripture study, and now I am reading Mormon. I love reading the Book of Mormon and learning the gospel. Sometimes I just wish that everyone would always read the Book of Mormon. The world would be a much better place, and like what Jacob 7 teaches, we wouldn't be so easily fooled by the distractions of our day. The title of this email is one such scripture that I enjoyed reading. It's such a shame though that not even 10 verses pass after this one (4 Nephi 1:16) before all that peace and love had ended (and about 100 years too) and the story resumes with the story of the destruction of the Nephites. I'm always a little sad to reach the end of the Book of Mormon because it ends in a pretty sad way, but one detail that I noticed this week is that God kept working to convert the Nephites through Mormon until they started to swear by the heavens and the throne of God for vengeance. Once they started to swear unrighteous things on the things of God, Mormon was forbidden to keep preaching and helping them and became only a witness to the destructions of the people. In Mormon 3:15, the Lord responds to the vain cursings of the people by saying: "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay". I never really thought about the importance of this commandment, but Exodus 20 explains it very clearly: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain". The Nephites stopped keeping the commandments of God, and thus didn't receive his help and protection and were left in condemnation. Keeping the commandments is very important.

Anyways...that's my spiritual thought for the day. Happy mother's day everyone! We got to celebrate it here in Honduras and in the United States so that's fun! We had a fun church service where cookies were passed out for the sacrament (because we had no bread) and we taught the Young Mens class for church! We also ended the day with a fun family home evening lesson with the pensionista to thank her for helping us so much here in San Marcos! 

This week we went to Quimistan twice, and they're almost done with all the road construction!!! Soon we'll be able to make the drive in 5-10 minutes instead of 1-2 hours! Traffic has been insane though. We're receiving a ton of referrals in Quimistan, so we're trying to visit and help them!

One special experience from Quimistan is that last week during our divisions with the district leader we contacted a lady and shared a small lesson with her. She was friendly but didn't seem to interested. We gave her our phone number but she never wrote to us in the end. But while we were in Quimistan this week we ran into her again and said that she wanted to meet with us again because we were very friendly to her. We also gave her our phone number again because she accidentally put it in wrong, and now we're in contact with her again! One of our plans for this week is to spend an entire day in Quimistan because we have so many people that we've been teaching over there.

Anyways, I'm kinda forgetting everything we've done this week! I just remember that this was a good week and that I had fun, and that's what really matters. Keep having a great week everyone and I'll talk to you next week! We're preparing two people to be baptized, so please keep Esmeralda and Diuman in your prayers so they can be baptized this Saturday!!! Thanks for everything!

- Élder Grant