November 21, 2016

This week has been a good, but busy week for us. One cool experience
we had was actually at a hospital- we went to give a blessing to a
woman who had been in an accident, and my inspired companion, Elder
Coleman, asked her if she wanted us to sing to her. She agreed, and
requested that we sing Hymn #84 (I think) "How Great Thou Art".
We sang, and I felt the Spirit very strongly. It wasn't the prettiest,
but when we finished, she was crying, and Elder Coleman was crying,
and I was not. But it was a great experience, and she absolutely loved
hearing us sing to her. The Spirit truly testified to her and to us
that our God truly is great, and loving, and always has and always
will be.
I am grateful for the gift of the Book of Mormon that He has given to
us. Without the Book of Mormon, I would not have a testimony of this
beautiful work. The Book of Mormon truly is the keystone of our
religion, and it is true! I know this with all of my heart and soul.

Appropriate love to you all
Elder Bush

PS more about the blog that i mentioned last week. I post about 2-3
times a week about something that I have learned. It is a great way to
share the gospel, which is it's intention, so give it a look!
It's elderjonasbush.wordpress.com


PPS- thanks to all the birthday wishes, i truly appreciate that you
thought of me :) here is how we celebrated. Shoutout to grandma for
providing these noisemaker thingamajigs for us to make obnoxious noise
with

To Dad:

it is super crazy to think that it is already week 40! its been 280 days. wow. my mission seriously is flying by, and i'm not sure how i feel about that.

this week has been good, pretty busy, because now we have 4 bike areas in cheyenne so we need to give them rides sometimes to meetings and stuff like that. we are fortunate to be able to have a car. but the battery keeps dying because after we turn it off, the tiwi drains the battery. we are taking it to the shop to get checked out tomorrow.

i don't have a whole lot to report this week, we have been seeing some cool miracles though. the cornerstone ward is notorious in the FOCO mission for being difficult to work with. they have been helping and supporting us a lot recently, which is super cool. we have been struggling trying to find people to teach, so it has been a great blessing to have support from the ward.

so we have two great stake presidents here in Cheyenne, President Bailey and President Thad Brown. President Brown is over the Cheyenne East Stake, and for the month of December, he wants all of the families in his stake to be visited, which is 1,727 households. he wants the missionaries to help by visiting all of the unassigned families in their wards... so some missionaries will need to visit 158 families in their areas by december 25th to deliver a Christmas message and an invitation to come back to church! it is a pretty daunting goal, but i know that good things will happen as we strive to accomplish it! it is so cool to see the hastening of the work of salvation in this area.

This week one big thing I learned more of how to do was how to receive revelation. we have a new way of weekly planning that elder c. scott grow taught us to do when he was here. it isn't crazy, but we start by praying over a baptismal goal for 5 weeks out and then set all of our goals to build up to that one. it helps us to plan out further in advance and to hopefully be as effective as possible.

when elder coleman and i were praying about one this past weekly planning session, we struggled for a little while. i realized that i had some preconceived notions and perceptions that were preventing me from receiving the revelation necessary, so i prayed for Heavenly Father to help me get rid of them, and as we continued praying for a confirmation of our goal, i was able to feel peace as we prayed about the number 5. for december 31st. which is a pretty high goal! but i have faith and confidence that Heavenly Father is asking us to try to achieve that goal. it was juts a really cool experience for me to learn how to receive personal revelation.