We have biked a lot in the last couple days.
Things here in Lexington are going great. We have been able to teach a lot of our friends and we have been able to enjoy the nice weather with a lot less humidity the last week.
This is the last week of our 6 week period and we find out whether or not we are moving areas on Saturday so if you have anything to send me wait until my next email just in case I'm not at the same apartment.
As I've mentioned before, we share a car with the sister missionaries so for half the week we get the car. The strange thing is that we don't actually live in the area that we are in charge of so we have to cross the city to be able to get to our assigned area for missionary work.
Also, because there is only one Spanish congregation we have members who live in the satellite cities who like to feed us. On Friday we had a family who wanted to feed us who lived in a town called Midway that is 18 miles away from our apartment. Luckily, there are some missionaries who live in a small city called Versailles that is only 7 miles from Midway. These missionaries took us and and our bikes to Versailles and we proceeded to Midway. After a great meal and a really good talk with the family we rode the 18 miles home over the rolling hills of Kentucky that were frustrating to to say the least. I will include a picture of a map and how far we rode our bikes.
I want to share a scripture this week from the Bible that says
"And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt." (Mark 14:36)
When I read this in Mark it made me think a speech that was given about how Jesus suffered and died for us. One thing that really stood out to me was that Jesus was the only perfect person to ever have lived yet even he asked the Father to take away his trials.
The reason that I want to focus on this scripture is because a lot of the time I think that we are really hard on ourselves especially when we are already going through hard times. The times when we feel like we could be handling our circumstances better or we feel like we just can't be christlike because we aren't perfect. What I gain from this is that someone a lot better and who had a lot more communication with God still had a hard time. I Also think that it shows that even if we do everything we need to be doing like going to church and following the things God has asked us to do, that life isn't meant to be easy.
We are put on the earth to learn and grow and the only way we can learn is to do hard things. Being happy doesn't mean that we will always be able to feel good, it means that we choose to look for the good even when we feel sad, lonely, frustrated, upset, and to the point of breaking.
I hope that everyone has a great week.
Elder Amata
1) A cool printing that we found that was a little strange
2) The other set of spanish elders in the city and Hermano Bobadilla
3)A sunset picture from the 18 mile bike ride home
4) we didn't have enough clips for the bikes so I used my belt to add some extra security to the bike rack lol
