Look Not Behind Thee

Hello all,

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas full of family, friends, good food, but mostly gratitude for the fact that A Savior Was Born ✌🏻️❤️😊 we spent the day at a very kind family's home, and with some of my favorite less active members of the church I have met here in Grove City. It was a bit sad in the beginning, but over the course of the day I gained a very strong testimony of the fact that true joy and triage of the soul comes from forgetting yourself and giving to others. It was nice to have a Holiday devotes completely to making other people happy!

I have spent most of this week getting thoroughly soaked. We only have a certain amount of miles we can drive our car each month and with a lot of emergency trips everywhere we are running pretty low so we have been on foot for most of the week. It's been super cold and rainy for the last three days so that's a party. On the plus side, the rain did

get us in a less active members house yesterday. She felt bad for us and even gave us some Hot Chocolate 😊 we ended up having a very good discussion on the New Year and some of the things their family could do to improve in 2016. They're still not super keen on the whole church thing but we are building a solid relationship with them, inviting them, helping them feel the spirit. We also did some interesting teaching in the middle of a severe thunderstorm.

One thing that has really frustrated me over this Holiday season is meeting all of theses nice, kind, amazing people who believe in Christ, but in their own words just don't have time for that right now. Our God is a loving God. He wants us to be happy. But he is by no means a comfortable God. He asks us to devote our lives to coming closer to Christ and that is a very uncomfortable refining process sometimes.Christ will always love us, and wishes to pour out more blessings than we can even comprehend, but he cannot if we don't make time for him. He gave his life for us, surely we can give up a few hours of our own lives for him! This applies to believers as well. Take time this week to make sure you are giving all you can to the Lord. Different people can give different things. For some it might mean spending more time with family, or spending more time in the scriptures. Are you holding anything back? He can make us into even more than we can ever imagine we just have to let him!

Ok, I'm off of my soap box now.

The spiritual thought of the week comes from one of my favorite Videos we share as missionaries. In the short clip they tell the story of Lot's wife in Genesis. When Lot was asked to leave Sodom and Gomorrah, he left all of his possessions and took his family away from the city. He knew that God had MORE in store for him in the future, and he didn't need to dwell on the past. His wife however gave one longing look back and turned into a pillar of salt. Now there is no scriptural reason documented for why she looked back. Someone in the clip suggested she may have forgotten her hand bag 😝 from personal experience, I have come to think it was because she longed to be there. She was afraid of leaving her comfort zone and didn't have faith that God had greater things in her future. We can learn from our past, but we cannot look back with longing. Heavenly Father promises that he will always make a way for us to become better through his

Son's atonement. I have spent a lot of my life looking back, I was always missing my last home, or the last set of friends I left behind. Now I realize that I missed a lot of opportunities because of that. God did not design us to be sad and dwell in our past #namethatconferencetalk he designed us to look forward with faith. To have Hope in a more perfect world because of his Son Jesus Christ. This New Years look forward. Learn from your past, and use that as fuel to be a little better every single day. Find something that God can help you improve on. Decide what he wants you to to be and go be

it!!!

Happy New Year everyone! Thank you for all the Christmas gifts, kind words, and prayers. Always remember that there is a crazy Sister Missionary in Grove City OH praying for you 😘

✌🏻️Sister Reynolds✌🏻️

Pics from the Missionary Christmas Devotional