An Unprofitable Servant

Dear Friends and Family,

Bo is doing well.  I have not eaten roadkill.

We are still teaching Jacob and Stephanie.  They are awesome.  We went to see them yesterday and I was kinda nervous because they didn't come to church.  Stephanie told us that they had gone to a baptist church because they were going to be like 30 minutes late to ours.  I was like, "NOOO!!!  You can come if you're late.  We love you and everyone was asking about you!"  They'll be there next week.  It's really cool to see their excitement for the gospel and the testimony that is growing inside them.  They are studying from the gospel principles manual and reading the Book of Mormon and they loved the Family Proclamation thingy and the gospel is just really being a benefit to them and I don't get to see that often enough in peoples' lives.  I'm very happy and excited for them.  We love them.

I was listening to m'boy Robert L. Millet throw down some doctrine like he always does a while ago and he referenced Mosiah 2:21 which I've read and treasured many a time before, but this time my understanding was expanded and my mind enlightened.  The final portion of the verse reads:

I say, if ye should serve him with all your ewhole souls yet ye would be funprofitable servants.

And I thought, "What does it mean to be an unprofitable servant?"  So I imagined that I owned this business and I needed to hire employees to accomplish my goals.  Well, if I hired 'unprofitable servants' that means that I would be hiring people and paying them more than they're producing for me.  And that's when it hit me, I'm here serving in Knoxville Tennessee, and we can pretend that I've learned to serve him with my whole soul, and I'm basically running His business into the ground but he's paying me the most outrageous salary with unbelievable benefits and plans to make me a joint-heir in the business with His son someday.  That was very humbling and made me feel even more gratitude for my Father in Heaven and even my parents here on Earth for all they do for me.  I hope all of us realize that we're getting paid way more than we're worth and that we resolve to give our best always.

I'm kinda scared about those announcements to use social media more as full-time missionaries.  I was like "I don't know how to talk to people online anymore!  All I have are face-to-face interpersonal skills now and those are still shotty at best."  So it's good to hear that there's classes on how to share the gospel using social media.  I only have six months left though, so by the time they introduce that junk here I probably will be leaving soon or will have left.

I will teach you some simple rules to sharing the gospel effectively though.  NEVER argue doctrine (also known as bible-bashing) and ALWAYS stress the importance of sincerely reading the Book of Mormon.  You can apply those principles to any question asked about our faith.

Good luck to y'all!  Have a great week!

Love
Elder Grabinger