Serve with your whole heart

Arrived Oct 14,  2015

Love you more than… Singing the classic 90´s kid´s t.v. show theme songs with Dominicans! Dominicans love their t.v. and so passing by a menos activo the other day, we spent like 15 minutes singing the Dragon Tales song, Arthur, Pokemon, etc. It was so fun!

This week in summary: 

Our area in Dajabon isn´t really progressing, only a few investigators and menos activo families, so we´ll still just spend two days a week there and focus more on the northern part of our area that we haven´t really worked a lot it. So many places to go and not enough time or lessons, haha. We gave a drawing kit and sang happy birthday for the birthday party of our most promising investigator. 15 year old Yeffri, who is like a giant teddy bear. He came with us to church on Sunday for the first time and had a seizure so it was full of excitement. We love sharing with a Dominican version of the “Anderson family” who love telling jokes and laughing with us two gringos. We have really good full days and then we have harder ones with a few lessons. Our house-mate and only Latino Elder Verde is now talking to us and so the district contention is over. We got fed like four times so we felt really spoiled this past week. We got a few elderly lady members to introduce us to menos activos, which was kinda fun. I´ve decided to cook/eat Dominican this apoyo (support money) period so for the next 15 days, I´ll be trying out the different forms of making rice that I´ve learned.

I briefly got to read over the family´s and Emily´s email and sounds like it´s been a nice full week. Seems like last week was a month ago for me. Josh sorry about your leg, but hey you´ve got a cool story! Samuel I´m jealous of the BYU hat, Jacob you sound like a little Dominican with your chicken the next step is turning them into chicken nuggets! Emily I´m super jealous of your sea kayaking class and hearing about Halloween, Star wars and Recess brings back great memories:) Mom and Dad enjoy yourselves in California and relax, you guys out-do yourselves. Give the Anderson’s my love and the next time you see the Sheffields/Grandma and Grandpa give them double hugs because I forgot to tell you that when you going down to visit for priesthood session.

I´ve decided my spiritual thoughts will follow the ponderism challenge from General Conference. I chose D&C 4:2 the classic “oh ye, that embark, serve with your whole heart and mind that ye may stand blameless before God. This really got to me and reminded me of a talk a read the other week. Really, there is nothing we have to offer to God that he doesn´t already have, except for just a few things. We have gotten everything from Him and yet the only things we have to give back are our desires and thoughts, our whole heart and mind. To really have to have faith and be disciples of Christ, we must give up our worldly thoughts and desires. This doesn´t mean not to have any, just to place them second or third or fourth. God´s work and plan for us should come before our own wants and ideas. He knows where we need to go so we need to let him show us by having a broken heart and contrite spirit. 

"ME THIRD" -Sheffield family slogan/crest/theme

First god, second others, me third 

With all my heart (the second part of it ;) ) 

Elder Sheffield 

PS. I keep trying to send pictures but this computer is lousy so hopefully a lot next week

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Elder Andrew W. Sheffield