Outline--Being a Light for Christ in our day-to-day lives

light

![[1 John Chapter 1#^d8d100]]

What do you offer a person who has everything? - Are they joyfull? Or just content?

Goal of a good church talk?

Stories that relate to this

  1. I lived without a Smart Phone for a year

    • I was in the minority for a long time
    • I saw how crazy the world has become. People no longer have to talk to eachother.
    • On a mission I-Pods and simple SMS could hold people back

  2. Glitter bomb for package thiefs

    • Sad to see mom who was trying to teach her child to not feel good about stealing, yet was doing so her self
    • Man who was smoking then turns to a small child and tells them to, "not be like daddy".

  3. A lady that we once picked up a huge garbage heep for asked, "if I wasn't taking the lessons, would you have done this for me?"

    • This was a hard one, as a missionary you really do have to make sure you're using your time effectively. Many times doing too much of one activity or spending too much time on one person will sacrafice it for another person. I had often, "dropped" invstigators who were just having us do things for them without progressing. It was a tough position, maybe not a fair one. But, I, to this day, still want to be worth of the answer "I would! I would help you no matter what!"
    • We even got some members to devote time to helping us! To take up a Saterday to help us!

  4. When we resurfaced the roads everyone had to walk to their cars, we talk to eachother

What are my thoughts on the topic?

  1. Tips to being good at missionary work

    1. Understand that the key to missionary work is doing stuff that's socially weird.
    2. good missionaries are ones who invite.
    3. Kids & family are the first ones you should help gain a testimony

  2. The easiest thing is to do nothing.

    • Use this to your advantage, if you do anything, you're a step ahead!

  3. We all want to be good, really bad

    • Even evil people will never openly admit that their actions are bad, but will always do their actions under the guize of being good.
      • This is a popular tatic of satan, switch out good with bad and bad with good. Very few people feel that causing people pain for no reason is fun, or other such things. There's always some reason they think of which justifies things.

  4. On my mission at first I was trying to convince peopel that members of the church were really good, but truth is, we don't have any monopoly on goodness.

    • There's mother tarisa, many other very good people who are probably going to accept the gospel in the next life
    • What do we have then?
      • We have covonents that God has given us, through official channels
        • Well that's kind of boring isn't it? Not really, it's actually really exciting because we can get greater assurences given the fact that we've made a more explicit decision. You don't get baptized into the church by accident, and you definantly don't go to the temple by accident.
      • We have the gift of the Holy Ghost, which provides us greater access to God's light
    • We just know a lot more about what's coming in the next life, and the nature of God
      • Many christians belive that we're kind of God's creations that he's not really that happy with.

  5. Why don't we all seem like we have good in us

  6. Is just living the gospel good enough?

    • yes, but, "living the gospel" is not easy. It requires us to go out of our comfort zones. To reach out to others

  7. The hardest part of missionary work is going outside of social norms.

    • Asking people if they want a Book of Mormon is not, "normal"
    • Asking people if they want to help is not, "normal"
    • Calling up people on the phone just to say, "hi", is not a normal behavior
    • Caring about others enough to go out of your way not very common.
      • I think people on the island, and the spirit of Aloha, is a step ahead of other places like in Utah

  8. Technology is like a safe cacoon of comfortableness

    • Nowadays people don't have to encouter any information they aren't already going to agree with.
      • People love stuff that sounds familiar, that's not weird or different. This is why we have to try to make the Gospel relatable to others.

Cutting Room Floor

There's this painter named "Simon Stålenhag" who has the most interesting paintings that depict things like an old station wagon in front of a house with an alien space ship looming in the sky. Or a man wrapping duck tape around a boom box in the middle of a winter feild with a looming alien spaceship in the background. One of his most haugting series has to deal with what appears to be VR headsets that started out to be some kind of...