Happily Ever After

MARCH 24

Dear Family and Friends,

I feel like all the titles of my e-mails are really cheesy and unrealistically optimistic, but I promise today's actually applies. In Church yesterday one of the speakers was speaking about obedience and gave a really cool analogy. She mentioned that in fairytales a princess always needs her prince, a frog needs a kiss, a beast needs someone to recognize his true beauty, a lamp needs to be rubbed, but we know that we don't need anything to have our happily ever after. Christ has already performed the task, He is who we need and He will always be there, we just need to accept Him, have faith and live our happily ever after. I thought that was such a great analogy. We don't need anything else to find joy and happiness in this life other than Christ. Also, as I was studying this past week about submission and drawing closer to God I found a verse in Alma that says exactly my thoughts. Alma 22:18"I will give away all my sins to know thee."  That is what God asks of us, He asks that we give away all our sins, everything that we do that disables Him to grant us His Spirit. He doesn't require us to give away our kingdom's or our treasures if they are helping us achieve His will, but He asks us to give away our sins. Jenny has been a great example to me of this. She was baptized on Saturday and it was so beautiful to see her come up out of the water and be clean. She has worked so hard over the past 16 months of her life to get to where she is today and it is so wonderful to be a part of her story.

In other news, we went on two exchanges this past week. I feel like I learn so much more from these sisters than I ever teach them. We had fun both days and I realized how much the Lord trust us as His missionaries. It is incredible to know that we can always turn to Him in prayer and He wants so much to hear from us. We can tell Him anything and He won't judge or criticize us for the choices we make. I am so grateful to know that God really is our LOVING Heavenly Father. He loves us so much.

We have a good week planned for this week, we have two more exchanges and we have our semi-annual Sister's Conference. All the sisters in the mission are going to get together to watch the Women's Broadcast on Saturday. I am really excited, it is going to be really fun.

I love you all and am so grateful for all your prayers and support!

Love,
Sister Cook