This week was actually a lot more calm. So that was kind of nice, not as hectic. We found a ton of new investigators so that's been nice to have fresh faces and new challenges. Imagine that, having it be nice to have new challenges haha. We're teaching an hermana M__ and she has a little baby boy named S___ and he is the cutest thing ever. Normally the babies and kids are a huge distraction in every lesson no matter how many little pictures of the prophet I give to them to play with...so I'm trying to work on having more charity for everyone, but mostly the little kids. M___ didn’t come to church but she's a great investigator who seems to actually want to learn.
So last week I mentioned how I made goals for my last six months of my mission so that I finish strong! 1. Be obedient 2. Read The Book of Mormon again (I’m all the way to 1 Nephi 14!) 3. Finish Doctrine and Covenants (Halfway done!) 4. Memorize Doctrine and Covenants Section 4 (...Getting there...) 5. Lose 15 pounds (...Almost getting there...) 6. Love every minute!
On Tuesday and Thursday nights a lot of the church's have "culto" or their meetings. There’s a tiny little church in our area that holds like literally I think 8 seats but every time we pass by there, I give a huge wave to the pastor and he always gives a huge wave back :) In the middle of his preaching! It's actually pretty cool if you think about it. We can still have that respect for other churches even if they don’t believe what we believe, even if they talk bad about us...we can still wave and say hi and be polite :)
We had been visiting a family right in front of our area and we ended up passing them along to the elders since technically they live in their area...but when we first started going there, the two little boys never wore clothes. Honestly I've gotten used to it but me and my comp would always be like "Where are your shorts? Where are your clothes??"and every time we went it got a little better! They would bring their clothes to their mom to have her put them on. Then later they started to put them on themselves! Then we would show up to teach and they would already have clothes on! So we laughed about how the kids were progressing more quickly than the parents were since the parents still aren’t coming to church...But it’s true, kids learn really quickly. One time as we were walking towards their little apartment, the kid saw us coming and he ran inside and came out with clothes on about 2 minutes later. We were so proud :)
Our newly baptized N___ is planning on going to the temple in a few weeks! We are so so so excited for him! I can just see him on the bus on the way to Tegucigalpa with the rest of the super strong ward members and him entering the temple and just being so happy and at peace :) We hadn’t even asked him about the upcoming temple trip at that point, but he brought it up, so we're especially excited. Now we just have to baptize his wife :)
We taught a part member family this week and two of the sisters that aren’t usually there were there and they all ended up coming to a baptism the Elders were having on Saturday! It was such a great thing to see because they just came! One of them came on Sunday to church and I sat by her. So we're super excited to see how things go with her! She's separated from her husband and has a little baby boy so she can be baptized a lot sooner than I was thinking!
We were trying so hard to reach all our goals as far as lessons went yesterday and we were like "we need one more "other", just one more!" So we saw a few ladies sitting together under a big apartment building and started talking with them. There was some party music being played up above us but we didn’t really pay attention to it. As soon as we started talking more about the church the music was being blasted on purpose and I was getting so frustrated I was like "Hermana, dónde están algunas piedras?!" (Sister - where are some rocks??) so I could throw them at the person blasting the music! But instead :) we prayed to have the Spirit with us when we shared our little message and gave them folletos and towards the end the person lowered the música after one of the girls went up to talk to them. Talk about another "hostile venue"...
So I've gotten better about personal study and everything, to where I'm starting it at like 7:30 now. I'll start a little CD we have of Motab and I'll eat my raisin bran while reading conference talks. It makes me feel super poderosa (powerful) as a missionary to be reading a conference talk while listening to the Spirit of God at 7:30 in the morning haha. It's really great though cuz I get more time to study and learn. But even though all the talks are great, I really like Elder Robert D. Hale's talk "If Ye Love Me, Keep My Commandments". It was super machete, but I liked how he explained about how Heavenly Father didn’t take away the Savior’s agency in the Garden of Gethsemane, but he sent an angel to comfort him. It's like in the mission, maybe you don’t have emergency changes when a companion really bothers you, but someone is sent to be super nice to you that day, or the donut man happens to ride past and you get to eat a donut that day, or you're given a little bit more patience to be able to make it through the change. Elder Hales said, "Why do any of us choose to be disobedient when we know the eternal consequences of sin?" While being on the mission I’ve learned the importance of accountability and not giving excuses. Making excuses is a waste of time and it's not "spiritually mature". Later he talks about how rationalizing disobedience doesn’t change anything, how it only "leads to confusion, instability, wandering in strange paths, being lost, and grief". And life is challenging enough. I don’t know anyone who wants to make their life more complicated...later he said "Obedience makes us progressively stronger, capable of faithfully enduring test and trials in the future." Sometimes serving here scares me because I feel like I'm being prepared for some huge, huge trial that will come in my life...but who knows. I'm learning a lot about trusting in the Lord and in the things He wants for my life so it's a lot of giving up of the desire to control everything and have everything go your way.
Another talk that really helped me was Elder W. Craig Zwick's "What are you thinking?" We're supposed to ask that question of what others are thinking with patience, but sometimes with my companions I just want to ask "What are you thinking?!?!?!" But it's true. Here a lot of times I hear "I just talked to her directly, hable bien claro..." But like Elder Zwick said in his talk, "Words that may be firm in information can be soft in spirit". So it's possible to be direct but do it in a loving, patient way.I also read the talks from the priesthood session and learned a lot about the priesthood. I loved when Elder Oaks said, "When a woman young or old is set apart to preach the gospel as a full time missionary, she is given priesthood authority to perform a priesthood function". That was a bit of an "Ah hah" moment...made me feel a little better about how important our calling is as sister missionaries.
I feel like a phrase that is always running through my head throughout the day as we're walking and yelling "buenas" and inviting people to change their lives, is "This is why!". We listen a lot to people talk and talk and complain about how horrible their lives are. It's true that they have really rough lives, but its pretty easy to notice why their lives are the way they are. A lot have straight up given up hope and just live day to day when its necessary to live for the future! I'm left thinking "this is why we choose our future spouses wisely...this is why we go to school...this is why we go to church...this is why we save money...this is why we don’t hit our kids...this is why we do what the Savior wants us to do". So don’t get me wrong it really is sad to see the effects of bad decisions in people's lives, but at least as missionaries we see those effects and hopefully we remember them, write them down and make a promise to ourselves to not make those same mistakes.
I had a dream this week that I saw my mom in a mall and I got to run up and hug her :) It felt so real. It made my week. Love all my family so much! Have a great week everyone!
Con Amor,
Hermana Despain
