You don't have to take my word for it!

FAMILY!

How is your first couple days of bishopdom?

PLEASE save me a reunion T-shirt. And some groats, too.

I got the Easter package! Thank you for the socks and for the beautiful picture, Luci! Your use of pasta shapes is most innovative. Hermana De Leon (her new companion) and I sat and ate all the pretzels in one sitting.

I don’t even know how to describe Hermana De Leon. She’s so powerful and intelligent and a very compelling teacher, but at the same time she’s so humble and...soft, I guess. She’s so peaceful. I love spending all day with her.

Thank you also, Jenna, for the foto of the egg. I get all fuzzy inside when you guys think of me like that.

Mom asked in the letter in the Easter package what was it that disillusioned me or made me so interested in finding real truth. It wasn’t one thing in specific, more that realizing that my thinking was so deeply permeated with 'false doctrine' about so many things.

Even in the church, unless we are feasting on the scriptures and making everything a matter of prayer, we are wrong about so many things. And we don’t even know, because our ideas feel fine and are accepted.  Most of the time we don’t even consider them as something we’ve chosen to believe. I guess I just realized how very narrow and fine is the ray of real truth. That’s why I like the definition of repentance in Preach My Gospel so much: “our love for [Christ] leads us to repent…to change our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that are not in harmony with His will.  Repentance includes forming a fresh view of God, ourselves, and the world.”

There is also the little gem-let that says: “No one can know spiritual truths without prayer.”

Man, if there was one thing I could beat into the heads of the people here is that THERE IS SUCH A THING AS FALSE DOCTRINE. People are so content to say to me “you have my beliefs and I have mine” or “we all are worshipping the same God just in different ways.” Or, something I hear probably two or three times a day, “Soy [religion] de mi manera.” (I live in the [religion] tradition)

I bear testimony that there is such a thing as false doctrine, and that NOT all paths lead to the same God, but rather there is ONE path that leads to ONE God. Christ taught ONE, VERY SPECIFIC doctrine, and if there are two different ideas about what that doctrine is, it is impossible that they are both correct. And if you do not believe in the CORRECT doctrine, the CORRECT instructions Christ gave us to return to God, or if you do not believe in God as He REALLY IS, you are not in the "straight and narrow path" that leads to eternal life, in the "broad path" that leads to destruction. So you had better be really sure that the things you believe in are THE truth.

And the way to do that is not to ask a bunch of people, or study and think really hard, or search the internet. It is to ask God, who is the SOURCE of the truth and cannot lie and WANTS us to know the right path to come to Him because He loves us. So of course He will answer us, His children, to confirm to us the correct path to come to Him.

And as the Reading Rainbow guy says, “You don’t have to take my word for it” that the Church of Jesus Christ is the true and only true church of God. READ THE BOOK! If the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith had to be a prophet and therefore the Church of Christ really has been restored to the earth and this is it. And the way you can know it is true is to-- ask God.

Phew! I explain that to people probably ten times a day.

On a different topic, here is a question I have been thinking about: Why does giving service help us to develop charity? What is it about service that engenders love? How does that work?!

Thank you for your letters, fambly. I LOVE YOU.

Love,

Hermana Ludlam