Week 58

Conference

Dear Family and Friends,

How is everyone? I hope spiritually uplifted from conference! I know I am! I learned so much from conference. I could share all of my personal revelation with you but Im sure thatd bore all of you. Its personal revelation so itll only be revelant to me. All I know is this we all needed to learn. Marriage is incredibly important and our spouses our even more important than our own children, and Im super pumped to get married hahaha! Baggy. And that our lives our too incredible and short too spend them glued to a four inch screen! If we cant sit through church without our phones, then we are literally breaking one of the 10 commandments by worshipping another god! I NEVER want to fall into that habit again.

We had a great pday. One of the funnest. We went to the beach in tela! We played beach volleyball all morning. It was great. 

I had an incredible week as always, The mission is awesome. I love it always. We found 14 new people to teach this week! Of those 14 we have a new complete family! And the father of this family, Rafael, is incredible! finally weve found a good man in san juan! haha Theyre awesome. Rafael is like alma the younger and paul of tarsus. He used to be a drug addict and a thief, now he has his family and works his butt off! Hes awesome. 

My highlight of this week was definitely our ward activity night in san juan. This week we did the dynamic of the atonement of christ where everyone gets a donut (instead of donuts we bought empanadas de leche from rafael) and I had to do 10 push ups for every empanada. Even if they rejected it, I still had to do the 10 push ups. In a short 5 or 10 minutes I did 240 push ups. I was dying. The members were trying to stop me telling me they understood the meaning and that it was enough, that I could stop suffering, but we werent about to stop. I suffered not even the smallest fraction of what christ suffered, but it definitely helped open my eyes to see the atonement from a better perspective. As I would get exhausted and want to quit, christ would come to my mind and remind me, "what wouldve happen if christ quit?" and I would keep going. It made me so sad when they would reject the empanada, because I was still going to suffer! I at least wanted them all to enjoy the sweetness! My comp told me that he noticed that I was sweating from every single pore on my body, and I could only imagine if those drops were blood. I can only imagine how discouraged Christ mustve felt as he saw us in his mind as he suffered, and he saw that the majority would reject that atonement for which he was suffering! How could he have kept going?! Only 3 or 4 said no to the empanadas, how could he have kept going when 99.99% said no to his atonement?! It made me so grateful to know that he suffered for all so that the few could be saved. I love him. And I know his atonement is real. I know he lives.

Always,

Elder Riley Hodson 

fotos. Elder Marin and my best bud in the mish elder criddle.