#72 蟹和跳蚤 xiè he tiàozao (Crabs and Fleas)

Hello everyone! Its has been a good week here in Camarillo that has been filled with service, lots and lots of service, we have moved a lot of boxes and random pipes and bags of sand this week, which has been awesome. In other wonderful news we started teaching a new person this week! We started teaching a guy named Allen, who is the husband of a less active member. He is super cool and has a lot of great questions about the Book of Mormon. We are super excited for him. This week we were also able to meet with brother Adame and discuss his relationship with Maria (who we are teaching). He confided to us about how he is holding off on marriage until they are in a more solid life scenario, so we discussed the blessings and help him understand some things. Hopefully things will start moving with them soon.

 

 

Now I will explain the title of this weeks email. Throughout the week we have been listening to some talks, and this week we learned about Crabs and Fleas. The speaker, Hyrum W. Smith. Describes some experiences from his life and science expirments. He first talks about Crabs, he describes an experience growing up in Hawaii. He describes cathcing crabs, they would catch the crabs and put them in a bucket, and you do not have to cover the bucket. Because anytime one crab would start to climb out, the other crabs would pull it down. He then compares us to the crabs, often we see people strive for success and we pull them down because we do not have the strength to climb out ourselves. When others strive for greatness we should cheer them on, not pull them down.

 

 

He also talks about a experiment done with fleas in a jar, you put fleas in a jar, cover the lid and light a flame beneath the jar, the fleas jump away from the hot floor and hit the lid, after 15 minutes the fleas figure that they can half their pain if they no longer hit the lid. After these 15 minutes you can take the lid off and not one flea will jump out of the jar. Because they have been conditioned that failure often hurts, so why try. We too often think this way as humans, we try to jump to greatness and fail. And after a few failures we no longer strive for greatness. The universe is open to us and we choose to remain in the jar.

 

 

Friends, family, Elders, Sisters, 姐妹和父老。 dont act like crabs and dont be afraid to hit the lid every once in a while.

 

 

Funny story for the week: On Saturday we went to go to Rhondas house to do some service and I operated the most janky redneck weedwacker ever, ot was pretty scary but also fun. Just thought you all would get a kick out of that.

 

 

Photos!

1. This phenomenal hot chocolate recipe I found

2. Service with Rhonda!

3. Take two on my chocolate covered strawberries