Sunday, Day 4

What a day! It started with my sweetheart waking me up with a happy message. That may have made my day. I am so blessed to have someone that cares about me and lets me know about it.

To be honest, I was kind of nervous about today. My ward started church at 1:30 in the afternoon and that is what I thought would throw off my groove considering I have had church in the morning my entire life. I thought it would drain out my day. Time did in fact fly today, however, I was surprised at how well I was able to focus on the Sabbath. I think it is because I wanted to stay focused on the gospel and in particular Jesus Christ before I took the sacrament today. So I focused all morning on spiritual things and by the time I got home from church, it was five in the afternoon!

So I had a good scripture study before church today and I want to share a few things that I learned that I feel are appropriate. I have always had a hard time distinguishing the difference between faith and hope. Well it just happened that today as I was studying the Christ-like attributes section of Preach My Gospel, those two topics were in the pages that I studied. This book described hope as "believing and expecting" something to occur and faith as a "principle of action"(pages 116-117).  So eventually, I came to the conclusion that faith is what you do to follow Jesus Christ and you hope for certain blessings because of what you did. The trick is to make sure that we are putting our faith and hope in the right spot. Another way to put is is faith is what you do to receive a specific hope.

The picture that I posted today is of my notes in my gospel study journals. One is for my daily scripture study, and the other is based on topic. I just wanted to say that I know that if we take the time to write down what we learn and feel as we are studying the gospel, we will learn more than we ever expected. By writing these sacred thoughts and feelings down, we allow the Holy Ghost to teach us even more because we show that we want to learn and that we value what we learn. I definitely see a difference in my study between the instances when I have a pen a paper right by my side and when I just have my scriptures. I have also seen a difference when I make an effort to organize and label my recordings too. You should try it some time :)