First and foremost, please keep the Farner family in your prayers.
Secondly, This week was amazing! We had a christmas party at the mission office in the center of Antananarivo to celebrate Christmas. I am very honored to be in the midst of the Lord's finest warriors. It was a joy for me to participate in a small white elephant gift exchange and to play the piano for a missionary choir. The gift I gave away was a small knife from Taolagnaro and a pink-striped tie, and I got a lego dung-beetle in return.
On Thursday and Friday, my companion got really sick and we had to stay in for a couple of days. That left me with lots and lots of time for listening to lectures and talks given by church personnel. One speaker in particular - Brother Truman Madson - gave 8 lectures about 45 minutes long each about very deep doctrine and deep questions that we might ask as members of this church. Perhaps these questions would sound familiar as you recall the questions you have previously asked yourself: Who is God? Who created him? How long is eternity? What is Divinity and Revelation? He covered all of these things. I was very perplexed at one analogy he used given by Lorenzo Snow years ago. He said (and I paraphrase), ''Imagine Mount Timpanogos, which is about 10,000 feet above sea level, and that it is made out of solid granite. Now imagine that every 1 Million years, a sea gull comes and sharpens it's bill on the mountain. A million years later, it comes again to sharpen it's bill again, and so forth. By the time Mount Timpanogos is worn away by the sea gull coming to sharpen it's bill every million years, that will be 1 second in eternity''.
Incredible! And Joseph Smith didn't just use the word ''Eternity'', but He said ''Eternities'' while talking about eternal marriage, God's time, and so forth. These things cannot be acquired by just thinking about it; It takes time and effort in order to search the scriptures and ask God about those things. This amazing knowledge is sometimes called ''Wisdom''. From the simplest forms of advice to questions that King Solomon himself answered, Wisdom is used to live a life of order and happiness. God has all wisdom and all knowledge, and He has all power (given the fact that He has children and worlds without number, and that no one can change the past). He will give you wisdom, which God ''giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not''. We already have a built-in system of wisdom given to us by our Father in Heaven called ''Common sense'', which can be used to help us make everyday decisions. Use it well, for Wisdom has more worth than worldly riches!
I love you all and have a Happy New Year of 2020, in which I will see you all again!!!
Love,
Elder Johnson
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