Sister Sinclaire Hancock: God always knows best, how much peace and true joy the gospel can bring

A group in the community we go help serve every Sunday

Monday
26 October 2015

It was a great week! Had a few cool experiences I thought I would share.

God always knows best

The Chen family: We teach this family together with the elders. There's Chen DX and Zhang JM and he is divorced, but they're now dating and have been living together for years. The daughter from his previous marriage lives with them and she's a member.

It was the elders turn to prepare the lesson, so we coordinatedMonday morning with them that we were going to share about repentance. We showed up to the house about 5 minutes early and get a text from the elders that we're teaching about conference instead and to be prepared to share what our favorite talk was.

We were a bit confused, but rolled with it. It turned out to be a really great lesson and at the end, the Dad got a bit emotional and really opened up. He said the lesson was exactly what he needed to hear and that we answered the exact questions he had been praying about that week. It was really neat to see how in tune the elders were with the spirit and it turns out that one of the elders wanted to fight the prompting because they had a different lesson planned out really well on repentance and they thought it was going to go really well and didn't understand why they felt they needed to share about conference, but in the end it worked out perfectly :)

God always knows best and I'm grateful for those elders' humility.

Ke Jiemei's baptism

How much peace and true joy the gospel can bring

Lu Jiemei: She got baptized last week so we had our first RC (recent convert) lesson with her and it went really well. We felt to share with her about baptisms for the dead and temples instead of typically starting from the 1st lesson.

Her kids both live in America and her husband died a few years ago of cancer, so she's pretty lonely. She had arranged to visit her kids in Colorado for Chinese New Year and was really excited and the whole trip was planned, booked plane tickets and everything, but then they cancelled on her because they said some things came up and it wouldn't be very convenient for them. Of course she was disappointed and naturally wanted to help and said it would still be fine to visit and that she would love to try and help them, but essentially what they told her was that it would just make their lives more stressful if she came and that they didn't want her help, so she was devastated by that and worried that she was going to have to spend Chinese New Year alone.

But she loved when we shared about eternal families and helped her understand how happy her husband was right now and proud of her for the decisions she was making and that she could have his work done for him. She started crying and held our hands and didn't let go until after the closing prayer.

It's wonderful seeing how much peace and true joy the gospel can bring into peoples lives!

Wish I had time to share more, but they'll have to come next week!

All my love!