Elder Austin Russell Cook Philippines, Legazpi Mission 8-2016 thru 8-2018: We came from a loving Heavenly Father who wants the best for us. I know that He is there, and I know He hears us and wants the best for us. We just need to reach out to Him to receive his help :)

This week was just something else entirely, I don't even know how to explain it. Elder Nonu has been such a blessing to me in ways that I don't think anyone else can really understand. In this past week, I've learned how to be more personally motivated, more personally obedient, and 10x more studious and self-reflective. In this last week, Elder Nonu and I realized that we don't have ANY promising investigators, so we hit the concrete and went tracting as much as possible. We found probably 13 new investigators this week, and about 8 of them seem REALLY promising! I'm so excited!

The Lord wants YOU!

Also this past week, I realized that I am just a horrible teacher. (this is him mom now: I think hes being too hard on himself) Seriously we teach a ton of lessons every day, and I've finally taken a step back to look at myself and how I actually teach these people the gospel. And I realized one important thing: I am not good at it. But this week that has been one of my big focuses: teaching with love and teaching for understanding. They say to teach so well that you cannot be misunderstood, and that's what I've been aiming for. So this week I just really focused on what I was doing, and who I was teaching, and things just worked out. The lessons are filled with the spirit, with love, and with understanding. When I actually started teaching right, EVERYONE just started opening up; they told us their life problems, their working conditions, their beliefs, and all of the questions they had in their hearts. It's really amazing how important it is to teach with love rather than just running through the information.

Because of Elder Nonu, I've been able to realize how to get myself more motivated and how to make myself 10x more obedient. I am so grateful for him every day that I'm here!

I think my mom misses my brother and I, she put this on Facebook this week

This week I spent a lot of time thinking about the probability of the existence of a supreme Deity, and why some people seem to believe that there is no God. In my personal opinion, the statement that God does exist is not just probable, it's actually a factual statement. It's stated better in the Book of Mormon, and is probably said better by other missionaries, but the truth is that EVERYTHING on this earth denotes that there is a God. Imagine just simple things that we take for granted: the water cycle, the way plants grow through photosynthesis, the complexities of the human brain. Some people believe in the Big Bang or whatnot, but from what I've noticed, no matter how much of a chaotic, uncontrolled explosion happened, intelligent beings do not just spontaneously appear. Intelligence is deviated from intelligence, there is no other way. To say that the intelligent beings on this earth were produced from smaller beings from other locations in the universe does not even begin to answer the question of where we came from. Though it's hard to face for some people, the answer is pretty simple: We came from a loving Heavenly Father who wants the best for us. I know that He is there, and I know He hears us and wants the best for us. We just need to reach out to Him to receive his help :)