So, last week i sent a novel so i´ll keep it nice and short this week,
yesterday was absolutely amazing! we have 1 investigator with a baptismal date for Aug 1st. and so yesterday we passed by her house before church and to my great surprise (after months and months of investigators giving excuses or not anwering the door sunday mornings) she answered the door and quickly got ready to come with us! so she (daniela) and her daughter Tiara (who´s 5) came to church with us! and loved it! she said she was only going to stay for 1 hour but ended up staying for all 3. I was overflowing with joy! this is one investigator that´s actually serious in her desire to be baptized and willing to keep her commitments and go to church! :D
And then Gina our other investigator randomly shows up during sunday school, apparently she´s practically a member, she´s gone to church every sunday for the past 3 months or so. So basically she´s ready to be baptized if we can just help her overcome her fear that she´ll not be able to continue strong in the gospel.
I absolutely LOVED going on exchanges with the other hermanas this week. it was actually super fun. i think i failed as a leader but at least i´m the sisters´ friend. haha. my very 1st exchange was crazy. that day the weather was insane!!!! I was walking backward as i made the effort to walk forward. i´ve never been in wind so strong before. it was 80mi/hr+. with rain (of course) i seriously was struggling just not to fall over as i walked. my heavy bag that i lug around almost flew away several times. so on this exchange we´re trudging through this weather as i´m trying to talk to Hna Vargas, it was super entertaining.
so the miracle for that day: we walked 40 min in this crazy weather just to try to contact a new investigator and when we got there no one was home. so as we turn around to head back i decided to knock on some random door. so out of the hundreds of door i walk up to this random one and knock. i look back and see hna vargas not quite sure about what i was doing and she says that this was the house of some ancient investigators that had stopped investigating the church. So now, i, unsure of my decision was contemplating if we should try another door but then the mom answers the door. and to my surprise she immediately let us in. her whole family was there and as we talked to them they really opened up. her son wants to be baptized but can´t because he´s only 14 and doesn´t have a way to get to church on sundays. so we focused on his parents and their desires. the dad participated a ton in the lesson and was very receptive (to which afterward hna Vargas told me he was always closed and never listened before) and the mom i started losing faith in her as i saw she´s super catholic but then at the very end of this super spiritual/powerful lesson suddenly says that maybe its just cuz she doesn´t understand everything that she hasn´t accepted the gospel but maybe if she could understand she´d accept it. so i told her we were there to help her understand the doctrine but then i testified of the power of prayer and the need to pray for an answer to see if the doctrine is true. the spirit was so strong during that lesson. i know it wasn´t chance that i chose that door to knock on, not having a clue that they were ancient investigators. I know that God is conscience of them and that now they have been prepared to accept the gospel and for that i was let to their door.
So at the end of the day the elders called hna Vargas and asked her how the exchange went. she answered, very different. so i´m there wondering what i did wrong and why this companion exchange was different. the next day as we´re finishing the exchange she told me it was different cuz i didn´t act like i was a sister training leader, she felt that i was her friend and she could be herself around me and talk to me.
the next day on my companion exchange Hna Marinho said something similar. I was joking with her cuz we had a new paper we had to fill out on exchanges and i had no idea what i was doing, so jokingly i said ´lets just pretend like i know what we´re doing and write something on this paper. haha, president will find out soon enough that it was a mistake to call me as Sister leader´ and then Hna Marinho told me that she knows why i was called as STL and its to break down this wall that all the Hermanas have, this vision of who the STLs are. cuz most of them work their whole mission for this calling and then take it way too seriously and the sisters feel like they´re only there to correct them in every little detail and such and that they can´t actually trust them and such (and such was my feelings towards my STLs cuz they actually bugged me to death haha, for that reason i didn´t want to be one of them) so Hna Marinho told me that she loved this exchange cuz she felt normal and that i was actually her friend. so basically i don´t know if its good or not but i´m here to break down the barrier that the word ¨sister leader¨ has created. i might be failing in my calling but at least i´m friends with all the sisters and for that they can trust me so i can help them better.
So i said this would be short and somehow i failed...haha. and i don´t know if any of that made any sense but bueno. well it was a great week! i love you all!!!
-Hna Hebdon la segunda
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