Jake Hough, 7.23.19--week 52

"Plastic guns and dull drums"

SSZZZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAA MIIIIIIIIIINDENKI!!!

As the wise sailor knows, along with the waves and currents of the sea, there are doldrums and dead spots as well. Else we wouldn’t like the exciting waves and speed of fast moving currents as much. So it has been the last week of my life haha! Not a lot has happened but there have been highs and moments for sure. 

I’ve been inside most the time, mainly due to the fact that I’m not sleeping well, though I have been improving my sleep (so it seems) by getting into a stricter sleeping regimen like when I go to bed and when I wake up that way it’s easier to control sleepiness. Haven’t seen huge improvements but I just started so we’ll see! I meet with the narcolepsy specialist in Austin on aug 5 to start taking medication and begin the titration process, but until then I’m waiting for that appt. 

To my delight I have been able to email with my sisters that are in Hungary declaring the Gospel and it’s been really awesome to hear from them that they are having HUGE success with more baptisms in one zone than I have heard of since I got there with them, I was ecstatic for them! Now if only I’d known that leaving woulda started the baptisms to rise I would have left sooner haha! Just kidding, that has no correlation 😂 but it’s just a joy to hear that they are well and good. Hard to believe I hit my year mark in two days, and they come home in 6 months...that’s crazy to me I was just sitting in the MTC with them learning about present tense definite and indefinite articles...wow it goes fast. 

While I’ve seen amazing miracles from being home (like a friend baptism, and Hungarian miracles as well), I’ve had some spiritual struggles to stay as diligent with the habits I built on my mission. This was a topic of large discussion in my last transfer as my companion was also leaving the mission to go home. He and I discussed long and hard about when we go home, we will be different, and the fear that he had about slipping so easily back into the habits he had before he left. I told him firmly that he was an agent of himself and that yeah he would slip but if he didn’t access the atonement and continuously strive to improve and maintain his spirituality and habits then yeah he’d lose em. Well, it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be being thrown back into the world. Being that I AM changed, I am different, coming off a spiritual high, it seems way harder to hold onto those habits. It really does. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or maintain and improve. Sometimes it feels like there is no time but something my mission presidents companion said really sticks out to me right now, she said very emphatically “there will NEVER BE TIME FOR GOD. When you get home you won’t have time for Him, you’ll have to MAKE IT. If you do then you’ll be ok and thrive. You’ll have to sacrifice time for Him then you will be ok.” It’s super true. More true now than ever haha! I’m beginning to understand it on an experience based level. My charge or challenge I guess is to make that time for God in y’alls lives, give him that small amount of time for prayer or for scriptures so he may bless you. That’s all he wants to do is bless us. 

Take care this week y’all, turn to Him in times of blessings and needs!! Get to know Him through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. 

Szeretlek Benneteket!

Jake

Piano on one of the airsoft courses.

And it worked!!! :)