Wednesday is when I got my greenie! Her name is Hermana Lindsay and she is a hoot. She's from Bluffdale, Salt Lake area and is super awesome. We've had some interesting things happen, these last couple of days and she is doing amazing, just truckin along, allowing me to drag her here and there.
Where to begin..
First night out. It's a nice night, finally cooling down at nearly 7:45. I decided to take her around the neighborhood, that way nothing too crazy would happen and we could still talk to a lot of people. First guy we talk to is awesome. Absolutely golden. We spend a lot of time talking about church and the Sacrament, I even give him a Gospel of Christ pamphlet (which we typically don't do as I had just finished explaining to Hna Lindsay) and asked if we could pray with him. He said, "Claro!! " He invites us inside where there are like 12 more people. He tells them, "They want us to pray for them!" I thought that was kind of a weird way to put it but I was happy that he was so willing to pray and now is inviting his whole family to pray with us, I was so excited. And then. Four of the adults join us in the room and Jose begins to pray. And then the rest of them begin to pray at the same time. This happens a lot with Catholics in particular, one leads the prayer and then they all repeat it but this was different. They were all saying DIFFERENT prayers, at the same time, mostly praying for us. And they keep praying. And keep praying and there comes a point where I begin to wonder if they are going to stop or if I'm supposed to say amen, and the whole time I'm trying not to break into laughter due to the fact that I have no idea what Hna Lindsay must be thinking. So I start praying (silently) and about 10 minutes later Jose says "Espiritu Santo, Espiritu Santo, Espiritu Santo,amen, amen, amen." and the rest follow in suit. We thank them and give them handshakes/hugs. As we walk away from the house, I turned to Hna Lindsay to try and judge her reaction, laughing because I have never experienced something like that and she was like, "But he was golden!" Welcome to missionary life :)
In other news, we don't have any progressing investigators but we have been seeing miracles. We ran into a ton of people yesterday and they all asked if we could come back "tomorrow". No one does that! We have lessons set up all night as well as all of tomorrow and we're really excited to see how the work is picking up.
We had a rather sobering experience the other night. Our dear friend M, a less active that we have been working with for quite some time, we found very very drunk. We mostly just listened to him ramble about how he wants to change, he doesn't want to be like this anymore. It hurt so badly to see this person, this friend, surrounded by cans of beer, fiddling with a cigarette, testifying of Christ and the Atonement. He loves the church and the Book of Mormon but he lets his natural man get in the way. At one point I told him that we were going to throw the beer away and he waved at us to go ahead. So, faithfully followed by my brave little greenie, we threw away all of the beer, half of which were still pretty full. Then we took his cigarette. Agency is one of the most important things that we have in this life. And it's also the one that causes the most pain.
On the upswing, Xavier and Jessica are this adorable little couple in our ward. She's 6 months pregnant I believe and they have been looking for a name for a while. They asked all of the missionaries for help, as well as for their first names and long story short they are 99.99% sure they will be naming their little boy Jayce. 😊
I love being a missionary. I love being a part of this work, bringing others to Christ. I was studying a lot about faith this week, it's one of those things that seems very simple, it's the foundation of all that we have. And yet, there is so much more that I am just beginning to comprehend. I reflected a lot on my experience with being sick. I was confused as to why I still felt so bad when I thought that I had the faith to be healed. I forgot though, that we are often used as examples. Our faith is something that doesn't mean we will be able to overcome everything without pain, without bumps. It's trusting the Lord, our Savior, who knows us better than anyone ever can, to heal us or to not heal us. He knows what we need a lot more than we do. He also knows what others around us need. And so faith is not to have a perfect knowledge, it's not to be perfectly healed. Faith is to trust that whether He heals us, or He allows us to go through hard things, it is His will and we will be blessed for it.
Ether 12:4
Les quiero!
Hermana Jaycie Baird
Washington Yakima Mission
No comments:
Post a Comment