Last Thoughts on Experience and Family Home Evenings

This is the final installment of President Pulispher's Message on Experience - The Master Teacher.  This message came at a time when I needed to remember that I was already a missionary, called, set apart, trained and working, I just needed experience in order to become a really effective missionary.

***July 2004: Messenger: President Pulispher's Message: Experience - The Master Teacher - ptfinale
          What have you learned from this great experience called a mission?  What would you trade it for?  How do you place a value on it?  Each time we see you, you have grown.  It is such a great blessing to see first hand the growth of a missionary.  Elder Simkins on Pohnpei bore his testimony; "My prayers initially were all about me.  At some point they changed to praying about others".  That is growth.  How do you really come to believe Cornelius, the Spiritual Engine, the Control Model, the Desire Model?  Theory has to be proven through experience.  Experience - The Master Teacher.
          The greatest testimony of this gospel is that it works in every aspect of our lives.  Your mission will become the foundation for the rest of your life leading into eternity.   Build it well.  there is an orchestration to our lives.  Our Father in Heaven has a plan for us.  We need to trust in Him and then go out and experience the plan.  Learn every day from this great experience called a mission.  Experience - The Master Teacher.

President Pulsipher touches on some of my favorite topics here at the end including: building our foundation for eternity and orchestration.  I believe that we are building our mansions up in heaven based on the way we build our lives and our personality and on our choices here and now.  That gives our lives meaning.  I also believe that our lives are orchestrated.  We are placed in the situations we face everyday to see how we will handle those situations.  Which build our lives.

16 February 2014

Our Monday family home evening lesson was based on the primary sharing time lesson on the creation.  I printed coloring pages from lds.org here,

I found this one later and I think it is much better.

We talked about the different days of creation based on our coloring page.  Then we had the babies collect toys that represented the different days of creation.  Pwopwo has day six where God created man and woman.  Lloyd has the animals: teddy bear, elephant and dinosaur :).  Tactac was supposed to hold the plants which are tree blocks.

They really cheesed it up in this picture.

At the beginning of the month we decided to start giving the babies a non-allowance (we just didn't want to call it allowance).  We realized that they saw us spending money shopping but didn't understand why they couldn't buy whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.  At our family home evening that week, we gave each baby $5 which is kept in their wallets and I hold onto the wallets.  We explained that they could use the money on things they wanted now or save it for larger things later.  (We are still trying to decide if $5 per month is too much.)  They both spent some money on quarter machine do-das early on.  Then Lloyd wanted to buy books from their school book fair.  We told him he would have to work for extra money.  Nakeu and Lloyd sat down and wrote out a plan for earning extra money.



We had a short time frame so the values of the jobs are high.  Lloyd did jobs each morning, for three mornings to have enough money for the books he wanted in addition to the money he had left from the beginning of the month.

He loves those books!  And we love watching him grow.