Elder Gatlin's Mission: Steadfastness in Faith

Hey!

Now I'm going to tell you a little bit about this past week. It's been really rough and really good at times. I just really need to work harder at not beating myself up all the time and not looking on the few bad things that I did during the week and I need to focus on the many things that I did right and all the wonderful things that God has blessed me with. It will take some time but I'm willing to change and I know that if I do all that I can that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ will help me further along. Personally I feel like I haven't done as well as I should've done this past week, and I hope that I can do better. The Scriptures are doing so much to help strengthen my testimony and they are such a big help to me to help answer my questions, and they help me find out how to answer other people's questions to the best of my ability. I'm still going through Mosiah right now, and I have gotten more out of the scriptures with the help of President Fenn's scripture marking card that he gives to all the new Elder's coming in. I hope that when my package comes that you will enjoy the gift and I hope that you will try to find your connection to someone in the scriptures as well. Mine right now would have to be the Brother of Jared. No, I may not have the amount of faith that he had, but I do know that I wouldn't be here without the help of the Savior and with the help of all those around me.

I want to challenge everyone this next year to think of something that you want to work on that is related to the gospel. Then I want all of you to then look through every book in the Bible, Book of Mormon, D&C, and the Pearl of Great Price, and I want you to mark it as you go through and read this next year. We all have things that we struggle with and things that we fall short in, but if we use the Scriptures that we have today and use them to help us improve in those areas we will for sure see improvement as we go through them. Always remember that you have to work towards it with faith and strive to have our Roots of Faith deep into this gospel. Then we have to nourish it and make it stronger as we go along, and we have to do it or else the tree will be ripped out of this gospel and we will slowly wither away like a plant not rooted into the ground. I challenge this to all of you and hope that you will try to find your Steadfastness in Faith and plant yourselves so that Satan and his followers WILL NOT be able to shake you with their winds of trial and hardship.

Thank you all for everything that you all do for me, I love all of you. May peace be with you and may you have His spirit to be with you.

Love,

Elder Gatlin