Monday, March 23, 2015

The Week We Almost Burned the Stake Center Down

Well, yet another week has flown by here in little Eagle Mountain, Utah! It was a week full of service, pranks, and bringing souls unto Christ! 

By the way, just an FYI so I asked for the legit emailing policy aaaaaand unfortunately I can only email for an hour and a half, from 10-6. You guys can send me all the emails you want but I only have an hour and a half to reply/write to everyone :( sad day. 

This week definitely had its ups and downs though. We had lots of appointments cancel on us, and lots of rejection, but que sera, sera I guess! This coming week is sure to be fun because we're headed to Provo today for a doctors appointment my companion has (soooo many miles on the car aaaahhhhhhh) and we'll be back in Provo again on Tuesday for a mission conference regarding iPads! We'll all be getting our new iPads (the ones we're paying for) which should be good. This week we also have VERO'S BAPTISM!!! Eeeeeek!!! I'm so very excited for her!!!

Anyways I'm getting ahead of myself. 


So, this week started with a trial game of marshmallow spit guns we played as a district. It was pretty fun! On Tuesday we had a very off day. I woke up feeling like that day was just gonna be sorta weird. We taught Vero in the afternoon, and had dinner with Sister Biscupovich (she's a high school spanish teacher and she always makes me feel so good about my spanish so I adore eating at her house) but the rest of the evening consisted of several cancelled appointments, nobody answering the door, etc. In our plans that evening we had the Anderson family. I don't know if you remember them, but we visited the wife a few weeks ago and it was a sort of frustrating lesson with her because she was offended by Utah church members and her husband is now Atheist so she's just sort of given up, she also told us that our mission call kinda sucked because where they "really need missionaries" is in South America and Mexico. (Little does she know that Utah needs missionaries because of people like her!) she's nice, but when we had left that lesson a few weeks ago we both agreed we should give the Anderson family a break for awhile. So, on Tuesday night when we saw their name for an appointment that evening we decided to pray, and ask if we really needed to go back there that evening. Obviously, the answer was yes so we drove to their house and knocked on the door, expecting a dramatic scene where we arrived just in time to comfort Sister Anderson, blah blah blah...but alas, we knocked on their door and she explained to us that they were busy doing taxes so she didn't have time for us. We left, and after trying all of our other doors in our plans (with no success) we just felt pretty down. I wasn't feeling too bad, because I was used to slow days since I've only been here since I've started my mission. My companion felt super down though, and we went to a members home, the Berta's. The Berta's are a super cool and sweet family from Uruguay and they're just simply amazing. Anyways, my companion wanted a blessing from Brother Berta but when we knocked on their door, he was the only one home with the kids so we couldn't come in, and he couldn't give her a blessing. So we waited in our car for awhile for his wife to get home, and when we found out she wouldn't get home till later we just ended up heading back home. I know the Berta's felt horrible for not being able to give her a blessing, and I felt horrible because I didn't want them to feel horrible so it just wasn't a fun situation, and it gave me all sorts of anxiety. 

But then Wednesday was lots better. The elders asked if we wanted to help paint a members living room, so we spent a lot of the day over there at the Andrews house. Sister Andrews is literally an angel. She was so sweet to us and fed us lunch and eagerly introduced us to her daughter, who was just called to serve in the South Dakota Rapid City mission and who will be leaving this month. (Fun fact, she'll be serving exactly where my brother lives in North Dakota!!) We had dinner that evening with Alma (ALWAYS THE BEST FOOD) and after teaching her again about the Plan of Salvation and the importance of temples we went back over to Sister Andrews house to help her daughter figure out if her shoes and clothes would be okay for the mission and to talk to her more about what the MTC was like and all that. It was kind of refreshing to be able to share my MTC experience because at every Hispanic house we go to, my companion is sure to mention her time at the CCM in Mexico and how great it was there and how she really felt like she learned the language well there. I always assure her that, we got the same lessons, same quality of teachers, etc here in Provo. Because she is always saying how she feels bad I didn't get immersed in that completely Spanish experience. Sometimes that stings, but I wouldn't trade my time at the Provo MTC for anything. ANYWAYS that was a tangent, my bad. But yeah, it was awesome to talk to Sister Andrews daughter about missions and I actually felt bad because I know how hard those last few weeks at home are (especially for the mom!!)  

Thursday we volunteered at the animal shelter! Karen was soooo happy to see us because she was afraid since we couldn't come Tuesday that we would stop coming! We helped her prep the food for the animals and just talked to her, and it was a very relaxing afternoon. That night we had dinner with the Familia Lara (we had carne asada-suuuuper yummy!) and later taught Mariana and her kids. We also got a surprise gift from the Otero's 10 year old daughter, Leilani! They had gone on vacation to LegoLand last week and Leilani brought us back souvenirs!! She got me a super cute tiny little turtle made out of shells that had a hat on it and little glasses! When I told brother Otero about it on Sunday he was like, yeah we all saw that little turtle and said look!! It looks like Hermana Gaviota because of the glasses, so naturally she had to get it for me :) it was one of the sweetest gifts I've gotten here in the mission, I love it so much!!

Friday was very interesting. We had our district meeting and were supposed to have lunch with our less active, Guindi, but....it fell through. So we went home and did our weekly planning then we met the Elders and Sister Berta (our translator) for Vero's baptismal interview!  While she was in her interview we played with the plan of salvation cut outs (thank you, carlos) with her daughter Bryanna :) Then......we stuck Oreos all over the elders car. But quick backstory about that: on Thursday we discovered that the elders had sabatoged the inside of our car, popped up our windshield wipers, and most importantly stole one of our dashboard animals, a cute little dragon we found on our car at transfers. As a ransom, they asked for 200 goldfish in a plastic bag, but we don't give up that easily so we told them they had a few warnings. One of the warnings was sabatoging their car windows by sticking Oreos and streamers all over their car while it was snowing. That evening, Sister Andrews was kind enough to have us over for some dinner, and while we were there we got a text from the elders saying "have fun at the Andrews!" So we ran outside and discovered that they had put the Oreos back on our car. It was pretty hilarious. 
OH also on Friday we went to the stake center to heat up some food (our basement doesn't have a stove and we didn't have time to chat with our landlord while we used her stove) and anyways, we were warming up some water in the kitchen and while it was warming up my companion wanted to go find a chair to bring into the kitchen to sit on so we both left and idiotically let the door close and lock. It was a bad situation, because our phone was in there, and the stove was on!!! LUCKILY I brought my iPad out and we messaged the English sisters asking if they could come rescue us before we burnt the chapel down. They came, BUT didn't have keys! So finally after lots of freaking out and the smell of burnt water seeping through our nostrils Sister Ricks was able to pick the lock and turn the stove off super quick. It was such a random and potentially horrible thing to happen! 

On Saturday....we drove to Payson!!! Well, Hermana Berta drove us to Payson for a baptism Sister Ricks wanted to go to. It was fun, but I felt bad for making Hna Berta drive us. But we got to know her a lot better and it was overall a fun trip. We passed by the new Payson temple and I took a picture-it's beautiful!!! ( Not as beautiful as Manti though) The Payson temple will open in June and the sister missionaries will be the hosts for the open house! Hopefully I'm close to Payson in June so I can help out with that!! That night we had dinner with the Taumoepeau family! He's from Tonga, but served his mission in Costa Rica and she's from Ecuador!! They decided to go to the Spanish branch so she could learn Spanish and so their little daughter could get a feel for her mom's culture, since they'd been going to Tongan branches for a long time. They're such a cool family though, she served in Hungary!!! We had some sort of white sauce with pasta and homemade breaded chicken it was super yummy!! 

Sorry this was such a long email full of silly stories! But that's basically all that happened this week!! I'm unfortunately battling a gross cold right now. I'm all congested in my head and nose and I've had lot of trouble sleeping because of it, and I usually wake up feeling like death. So that hasn't been too fun but hopefully it'll chill out this week. 

Anyways, my spiritual thought is a quote from Elder Holland that's in a mormon message about taking the wrong road after praying and feeling like it was the right road. Towards the end, he says 
“I have absolute certain knowledge, perfect knowledge that God loves us. He is good. He is our Father and He expects us to pray and trust and be believing and not give up and not panic and not retreat and not jump ship when something doesn’t seem to be going just right. We stay in, we keep working, we keep believing, keep trusting, following that same path, and we will live to fall in His arms and feel His embrace and hear Him say, ‘I told you it’d be OK, I told you it'd be alright.'"

I dont know about you, but my first instinct when something isn't going right is to panic and jump ship. I don't like feeling like things aren't going perfectly, and man have I learned that nothing in this life will ever be perfect EXCEPT this gospel, and the perfect love our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have for us. I can't wait to fall into His arms and hear him tell me that I made it, that everything worked out, and that He loves me. It reminds me a lot of my own parents, after I've gone through something really, really hard, or I've made it through something I thought I would never make it through (such as my second semester of college, or music theory, or countless performances and auditions) and after I completed each of those hard things, I remember my parents saying "see? You did it! You made it! I told you things would be okay." And I know Heavenly Father does the same with us. Because He does love us, and wants us to grow and learn from these experiences in life. We just have to put our trust in Him. Trust has become sort of a tricky thing with me, because of certain personal experiences I've gone through in the recent years so I'm really having to let go of all my doubts and distrust and put my complete trust in my own Heavenly Father. And it's so hard, but I know in the end He's going to hold me and say "I told you it'd be OK." 

Love you all more than ever!!! 


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