18 Month Mark

Hello everyone!

Another week down and another P day has come, time is really starting to go fast as this week I hit my 18 month mark! Hard to believe I am 75% of the way done, I have so much more I want to do here and so many people that are still waiting for me that I know these last 6 months are going to be really busy and really fun! 

This week was really awesome.  I got to go to a Thanksgiving dinner and have all the stuff I would have back home in America, it was really awesome, but it wasn't as good as Grandma's and Mom's cooking and I can't eat American food like I used too. I'm going to come home and not be able to eat anything, but I'll be missing my curry. Ever since our dinner we have been in full Christmas mode! I love Christmas and am so excited for Christmas this year and to Skype my family. We have started a Nativity and Caroling at the Mission office every Saturday night for all the wards and branches here in Delhi. Elder Dass and I are in charge of it and it will be every Saturday evening for the next 4 weeks.  We already had one this past Saturday, so we are full of the Christmas Spirit! We have been singing and playing Christmas hymns and we even got a Christmas tree from the office and put it up in our apartment! Now if somebody can send me about 10 gallons of eggnog I would be the happiest person in India.

This week we had something really cool happen, we saw and walked with Elephants!! We were just out in our area finding and there they were walking down the streets! It was the coolest thing ever and I have seen some before but this was the first time I had my camera or could see them long enough to take a picture. They are so legit and I even touched one as it was walking...they are kind of fuzzy ha-ha. Definitely a moment I will remember for a long time, I love my mission and the things that can happen any day in Delhi.

This week I have been trying to study more from our living prophets and apostles and I found a couple talks online. If you go to speeches.byu.edu you can find tons of talks from all the devotionals they do at BYU and I also get talks from General Conference off of lds.org. This week I read a talk called, The Blessing of Work. It was a really good talk and I learned a lot from it, I am so thankful that I was taught from a young age to work. I never thought that it was a problem in the world because where I come from and in my family you are expected to work, and to work hard. But throughout the world, there are a lot of people that don't know how to work. Heavenly Father wants us to work; in fact it's a commandment to not be Idle and waste our time or to rely on other people. We are supposed to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow. I learned something interesting from the talk that said, "God chooses to work, he has all power and all wisdom, but still he chooses to work." God has a plan and he is working continuously at it. I truly believe that work is such an important thing in a person's life. I am thankful that I am able to work and that I was taught by my amazing parents to work. I also am thankful for the teachings of our Prophets and Apostles and I invite you to listen to them and to read their talks and their teachings often. BYU speeches or General Conference talks, read them and read them often, you will be blessed by following their teachings. 

I love you all.

Elder Armstrong