What a week!
Still not quite sure what day it is, where I am. We have been all over the
place and it's been pretty fun. Definitely some good highlights to the week though.
This week we had Zone Trainings (I almost said capacitacions again but I
remembered you all made fun of me last time!) so we were in the 10 zones, 2
zones a day. Lots of travel! But very fun. The mission is doing really
well.
My favorite
part of the mission right now is being able to be with missionaries. I get to
see so many attitudes, desires, goals, styles of teaching,
attributes, etc. It's basically like getting to try every single flavor in
Baskin Robbins or Coldstone (dang ice cream sounds SO good right now). This
week I learned quite a few lessons - both from my own behavior and from the
behavior of those I was with.
Thursday I was
with a young missionary and it was arguably the worst day of my mission. He had
so much pride, so much egoism, so much ridiculous attitude. I was frankly ready
to just leave and go back to Concepcion. haha I was so furious. It was just so
much lack of focus on the work - he cared about himself. The little problems
that were happening, the people that were in his sector, the fact that they had
to move houses - everything "made him mad". In fact, for the past 6
weeks "he has been really mad." Well, that's awful! 6 weeks mad?? I
physically can't fathom that. I was baffled and called him out on it so bad and
told him to forget himself, be humble and just serve everyone else. It was so
sad to see that probably the same attributes that I started the mission with
(and many times still have) impeded a young missionary from enjoying life: One
thing I have VERY intimately learned is that happiness is not, in ANY
way, circumstantial. It physically cannot be. Just like Mary's email said, we
are the ones who decide how we react to things. When we forget that God loves
us and forget our faith in him, trials start to look like punishments or unfair
and stop looking like opportunities for growth. It's really cool to see first
hand why faith is hope, because without faith we literally have
sadness and problems. So...long ramble, but in the end, it was really, really
frustrating to see how one missionary's attitude could impede an entire SECTOR
from receiving the gospel. I'm confident there were people there that won't be
found for awhile because God won't throw his pearls before swine. Does our
attitude impede God from blessing us? I fear that in my case, many times it
does.
And another
experience that was SO cool. So we went to a volcano this week! We took our
pday in the south of the mission and decided that since we were out there, we
should visit Volcan Llaima. Absolutely gorgeous. We are in fall right now so it
was already colder, but still a super nice day. And we got to see snow! I threw
my first snowball in 2 years and I was happy as a clam. It actually worked out
that I was with Elder White and it was so fun to be back together again and
have time to talk. That kid has changed my life more than any other companion
on the mission. I sure do love him. It was cool to reminisce on the mission and
then to look out on our mission, almost all of it visible from the top of the
volcano, and to just pray and thank Heavenly Father for it all. We knelt down
in the volcano rock and dirt and snow and just said a prayer, and it was one of
the coolest experiences of my mission. I felt so grateful for
everything - for the time, lessons, experiences, people, food, scenery, nature,
wards. LIke it was just an incredible experience. Then we did our best version
of Lehi or Noah and "shouted repentance unto the people". We just
shouted as loud as we could on top of the volcano. Pretty cool. And when I say top
I don't really mean top, I mean more like base, but we had to hike 2 hours to
get there so in my mind it's top. Photos next week!! In the end, we just ran
around though and took a million pictures and had a blast. So fun!
I love you
all. I'm so grateful to be a missionary. I love it more than anything.
Hope you all have a Happy Easter!
Elder T.
No comments:
Post a Comment