Elder Zach Seager

This week, one of the cool things our CCM Mission President shared was his missionary work family tree.  If you start with the Mission President and count his missionary years and add in his children who served and his grandchildren, the years add up to 55 years of missionary work treeing down from him.  I started to think about this and if you take Grandpa Harmon and my uncles and their kids who served plus Eli, Elizabeth and me, that's 24 years of missionary service just in my family. I was reminded of one of my favorite church talks this week from D. Todd Christofferson where the gardener comes out and cuts the bush and the bush says why did you cut me?  This happens three times and the bush gets mad but then eventually is the biggest bush in the garden with the most flowers.  "God is the gardener here.  He knows what he wants you to be. Submit yourselves to his will.  Be worthy of his blessings, and you will get his blessings."   ...

This week was hard.  The first three days were super hard.  Then I decided to totally forget about myself and stop being a baby and focus on Spanish. Every time I had free time instead of focusing on myself, my friends and ALTA, I started thinking about how I could improve myself and I started setting goals.  So I set goals like I wanted to speak and memorize this and this in Spanish and be able to talk to 10 Latinos a day.  Then I set a weekly goal.  This has been the thing that has helped me the most.   Then one of the General Authorities came and talked to us.  He talked about how the atonement helps us every day.  He told this story where the fishermen are fishing and Jesus walks out and says drop your nets and follow me. He told everyone to drop their nets metaphorically ... for me it would be skiing, soccer and girls and all that stuff I am losing out on and forget about myself.  It really hit me hard.  ...