Piece of Heaven

Best first week of december in my entire life!!!! It was so incredibly awesome! We of course kicked off this week with the "Light the World" initiative that the church has this year. And wow. Service is SO AWESOME! It was a true blessing to see the other part of our calling and our duty.

Basically every day this week we were busy serving or traveling. We had very little lessons but you know what? I've never felt better! Sometimes we get super focused on numbers and how many lessons we have and all that jazz. It was nice feeling that even though we didn't teach a lot, we could feel that we did all we could. I want to share with you a few super large and great service projects we did :)

December 1st was the world wide day of service. So we did just that. our district leader had planned a project to clean a park in a neighborhood in their area. Okay, I'm not going to lie, we were not in favor of this activity. We might have complained just a little. We felt like we weren't changing lives picking up a few pieces of trash. So that's a small background comment haha. As we were cleaning this park I thought "Katrina, service is service. Stop complaining!" So as we continued, a thought about an investigator of the elders came to mind. I asked what ever happened to him. From that moment everything changed. We went to this old mans house to clean it. This poor man was living in a very dirty home. We spent hours there cleaning his home. It made me think how blessed we are to have a Prophet of God tell us how we can make our home our own little piece of heaven. I know that the spirit can only dwell in clean places, spiritually and physically. It was such a great feeling to know that this man can know feel a little more the presence of God in his life and feel comfort in his own piece of heaven. 

Then a few days later, we did another service project in the house of 2 little convert boys and their less active mom. It was a ward activity and it was a surprise for them! They are passing a lot of hard stuff right now. We just showed up and started cleaning, painting the walls and we gave them a whole bunch of food to stock the house. Wow. It felt SO GOOD! The next day in church, Diego (14 years) gave his testimony of gratitude and the tears just came a flowing. I couldn't control the happiness in my heart. Serving blesses the lives of others. And when we feel happiness and receive blessings...well that's just a huge bonus that God gives us.

I know that service is the gateway to developing Christ-like love. The love of Christ is real. He lives and we can testify of Him every time we are willing to reach out our hands and lift one another. I love you all sooooo much!!!! Have a great week!!!!

Hna Cross

Service in the park

Cleaning the old man's house

District get together