They say you live about ten years of life in the 1.5/2 years that you´re on your mission, and I believe it, as every time I sit down to write about the week, I have a smallish panic attack as to how I´m going to fit it all in. I´m also just going to use that excuse to explain why I have rather a lot of gray hairs for a 20 year old, as EVERY one of my companions and EVERY one else has kindly informed me. My companion from Honduras taught me the word "canas" right off the bat, and when I didn´t know what it meant she said it was "pelo de abuelitos" - "grandparent hair"... muy bien.
As more and more missionaries have started coming out, the Church came out with a booklet that they give to all the missionaries called "Adjusting to Missionary Life". It has different sections with techniques in how to deal with physical, emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual demands. We just call it our stress book. When anything does not go to plan (so ALWAYS), we wish we had the stress book. Unfortunately, it does not have a section for what to do when traveling preachers shout at you and call you hijas del diablo, or when 7 dogs start running at you barking madly or when you're trying to install someone´s washing machine and you forget to put the hose down the hole before it reaches the part of the cycle where it starts draining and it shoots out water all over you and the kitchen. Although maybe those fall under "responding to stress emergencies". Their advice for those is to take a few deep breaths and keep working. I would expect nothing less from a missionary stress book.
Anyway, a lot of the work here is helping less active or inactive members come back, but there are so many of them and only about 50%, or less, of the addresses in the ward list are correct, so we´re always finding more that aren´t on the list and adding them on. We´ve also made a huge list of addresses in the ward directory that we have to find to figure out if the people live there still. So one day we were looking for one of these addresses and we knocked the door and a sister that we´ve seen a couple times in church answered the door (always a nice surprise). We pretended like we had known that this was her house and she told us she would love to invite us in but her son was about to come home and she didn´t know if he would be too excited that we were there. Well I didn´t understand/hear her very clearly (it was QUITE windy), and only heard the part where she said she would love to invite us in. So I waltzed right in.
So we were sitting at the table drinking some herbal tea with her when her son came in. She told us he is also a member, but hasn´t been to church in years, so we were our natural, charming selves and got to know him. A couple days later, we came back to visit them and he invited us right in. We started talking to him and we got around to the fact that he knows the church is true, that he has a testimony of the church, but when he moved here, he felt that the other members were cold to him and not very inclusive and so he stopped going and from there lost a bit of control of his life. I told him I had thought a lot about this, because there are a lot of people who say similar things. I read him Alma 23:6 which partly says that "as the Lord liveth, as many of the Lamanites as believed in their preaching, and were converted unto the Lord, never did fall away." I had always thought about this verse and wondered how I could help the people here gain this type of conversion. Then I read him a quote from Elder Bednar that I had taped into my scriptures that says, "Note that the Lamanites were not converted to the missionaries who taught them or to the excellent programs of the Church. They were not converted to the personalities of their leaders or to preserving a cultural heritage or the traditions of their fathers. They were converted unto the Lord - to Him as the Savior and to His divinity and doctrine - And they never did fall away." He was quiet for a few minutes and then he looked at me and said. "Me dio algunos palos". Which translated literally means I gave him some logs, but not literally means that I had said something pretty direct and straighforward to him... more or less. He was quiet for the rest of the lesson but that as we got ready to leave he said "I just want to tell you how grateful I am for what you´ve said, it was good for me to hear and I would really like it if you would both keep coming back." He´s a very reserved person and this little speech that he gave was one of the most heartfelt things I´ve ever heard anyone say. I wish I could describe how grateful I felt to be right there in that moment.
Well my time is up, so I must go but I´ve added a picture of me and my companion with one of our piano students. He´s quite funny.
I love you all!!! Chao!!
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