Sept. 30th, 2019 Letter #99

My favorite part of the week was stake conference. There was one person that talked about how to have good communication with your children that I really liked. Perhaps I'm a few steps from there, but it's never too early to learn. 

This morning I was listening to a talk from Elder Christofferson that helped me understand something that I was trying to grasp for quite some time. I'm aware of the fact that the apostles are also called to be prophets, seers, and revelators. So I'd been wondering why we always say that the president of the church is "the prophet." Elder Christofferson quoted President J. Reuben Clark in explaining the following: “[We] should [bear] in mind that some of the General Authorities have had assigned to them a special calling; they possess a special gift; they are sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators, which gives them a special spiritual endowment in connection with their teaching of the people. They have the right, the power, and authority to declare the mind and will of God to his people, subject to the over-all power and authority of the President of the Church. Others of the General Authorities are not given this special spiritual endowment and authority covering their teaching; they have a resulting limitation, and the resulting limitation upon their power and authority in teaching applies to every other officer and member of the Church, for none of them is spiritually endowed as a prophet, seer, and revelator. Furthermore, as just indicated, the President of the Church has a further and special spiritual endowment in this respect, for he is the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator for the whole Church.” 

One challenging thing that's going on is that we are really struggling to get people to progress. Hopefully things will change soon (that's something you could pray for). 

One funny thing that just barely happened is that I had to put "profetizar" in google translate to remember how it was in English. It's prophesy just so you know. I was thinking that it couldn't possibly be profetize. Imagine that one in a sentence. 

One tender mercy is that there's a lot of new missionaries in the zone and a couple of them are always asking for advice and looking for a good example and so that keeps me motivated to be on top of things. My zone conference is on Friday.

Love you,

Elder Finlinson

We went to a pretty fancy pizza buffet to eat today. I was on splits with Elder Martinez (far right) because Elder Shumway and his (Elder Martinez) companion wanted to do something else.