Monday, January 12, 2015

Talking With God - Elder Kolby Madsen

Written by  Elder Kolby Madsen, serving in the Denmark Copenhagen Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speaking Danish.

This week was great. We scheduled a baptism date with one of our new friends, who just happen to be dating one of our recent converts, way great. She wants to get baptized on the 7th of February, so that should be great. We are working hard with her.

We have a date that Ma** wants to go to the temple.  It has moved around a bit, but we now have the date set in stone, the 24th of January. We will be going to the temple to have great time as Ma** and the ward go through and do dåb for de Død. yeah! Should be way fun.

I also got word of one of the guys that I taught in Randers is getting baptized this week.  So I will be going to that on Saturday, hopefully. It should be a great experience.

We also had 10 people in church. One friend who is not a member and 9 others who are usually not very active, and one of them got reactivated yesterday. It was way good. We had a great day in church this week. So many blessing that have been happening in the ward, and the Lord is very loving towards or friends in the ward here. It is so great to see how much better the work goes when the ward works with the missionaries to accomplish the same goal, instead of their own goal.

We had an appointment with our friend who we have been talking to about baptism, G**.  He said he is going into the doctor to get his back checked out on Thursday, and then he will tell us when he wants to get baptized. So, that should be way good.

We have been working hard. We had some really good stuff happen this week. We went to visit some of our friends down in Næsved in the southern part of our area. While down there we got a referral for another person in the ward who is less active and lives down there.  He was way excited to meet with us and we are plan on meeting with him more and more, it’s great.

We have had so many blessings in this area. I am so grateful it’s been such a great week. We had a great lesson yesterday in Priesthood Meeting about prayers. We talked about how the greatest commandment is to love God. They made the point that if we loved God, we would want to go out and get our home teaching done. We would want to go serve our neighbors. Then we talked about what we need to do to gain a greater love for our Heavenly Father, and how we could do that. We talked about how we gain a love for people on earth. By talking to them and taking time to get to know them. We talked about how it is the same way we need to talk to our Heavenly Father. To gain a relationship with Him, we need to take the time to get to know Him through our experiences and through prayer.

We also talked about how some times in life we need to make appointments with those who we would like to talk to. Then the teacher made a great point by asking how many of us have a time in the week where we schedule time to talk with our family members about things that are important? Then he asked, "Do we do the same for our Father in Heaven?' Do we talk things through. We claim that we have a conversation with God and that we really believe that He speaks to us through the Holy Ghost. Why do we sometimes just kneel down and talk AT God for 2 minutes (if we are lucky), instead of  speaking with Him and giving Him time to respond?

Sometimes I feel that we get caught up in praying for things, asking for things, or even just thanking God for things, but we don’t stop to listen. I would like to invite you, the next time you have a question for our Heavenly Father, to kneel and pray THEN listen quietly without any distraction. I know and promise that you will get your answer in a prompting from the Holy Ghost. We need to practice what we preach and have a conversation with God. Listen to the thoughts and impressions that come within our prayer. He is trying to talk back, but sometimes we don’t listen.

Med Kærlig Hilsen

Ældste Madsen

Drunk People and Flaming Explosives (January 5, 2015)

Accelerate the Work  (January 19, 2015)