Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Hello! So this week was pretty great. We conducted the last two exchanges for this transfer and so we were pretty busy. They both went super well. Both of them were with two people of a trio coming to my area, so I got to sleep on the floor. But besides that, they were really good. We got to see cool miracles of timing during them both for being able to find potentials to visit in the future. We got to serve people in the ward as well and I really feel like I was able to help out the companionships to better be able to be guided by the spirit and to have more unity in the companionships.

Another huge thing that happened this week was that we got the package in the mail on Monday. When we were in line at the post office waiting to pick up the package, I informed her that I wanted her to open the package and the excuse was because she doesn't ever get packages from her family. She told me that I was being ridiculous and you don't just open other people's packages. But I insisted and so when we got home it turned into a hilarious hide-and-go-seek round with the box. I put the box on her desk. She put it on my desk. I put in in her closet. So she put it on my bed. I put it in her dresser. She put it on my toilet. Haha! And it just kept on going. I still wouldn't open it by the end of the day, so she finally decided she would. She had been using the excuse that my name was on the box, so I scribbled out my name and wrote hers. She was so cute opening it because she cut all the tape and then closed her eyes and reached in and was feeling it with her eyes closed (I was taking pictures the whole time) and when she realized what it was she looked at me and started crying and told me to put the camera away. She loved it so much! She was like a little kid playing with the best new toy in the world as she looked up her favorite scriptures and read them in English. Each day after personal study, she would excitedly tell me, "guess what? I just read 1 Nephi 1 (or 2 etc) and I understood it!" She's so excited to go to the Mission Leadership Council this week because she wants to raise her hand and read all the scriptures now that she has them in English. Oh and she loves so much that now she has a Bible Dictionary! She was studying Faith in it this week, for instance. Thanks so much for helping me out with that! It meant the world to her! 
Also, she passed her 18 month mark this week, so that morning after working out, I used the excuse that I was going to make her breakfast to send her to the shower to cover up the even bigger and better surprise that I had prepared for her. I had 18 balloons and in each of them I hid a piece to a paper puzzle I had made with a hand drawn picture of the LA temple on the front and a note for her on the back with a scripture on each piece that she can take with her to help her in starting the next phase in her life. Then I hid the balloons all over the house and she was like a little kid again running around the house like she was on an Easter egg hunt!! It was so much fun to see her! Especially when she for some reason with the first one decided she wanted to pop it with her bum. She quickly decided she didn't like that idea but it was so funny!! 
One cool finding miracle this week was when we had just finished an exchange and we had a few minutes while we were waiting for other hermanas to text us where to meet them because we were going to help them find people to teach. So we stopped home for just a few minutes to grab a quick lunch and check the mail and for some reason we had decided to park on the street rather in the garage like we normally do. But on the way out we just said hi to this one person and he stopped and started talking to us for a bit. He was a Jehovah’s witness but he was going through something really hard in his life right then and he said that us just saying hi and starting to talk to him made him change his mind. He had been on the way to go buy some liquor but he changed his direction and came back to his home. He let us give him our water instead and he promised he wouldn't go drink. And we gave him a Book of Mormon with a chapter to read and he promised he would read that chapter. It was super cool! You never know what kind of an influence a simple "hello" can be! 
And I love this feeling like no matter where I am I am exactly where the Lord needs me to be. Like yesterday our investigator who came to church on Sunday after only one lesson with him and who we just set a baptismal date with wanted to take us to Baskin Robbins for the lesson we set up. And it just so turned out that the cashier at Baskin Robbins was a person who was inactive and used to go to church like 10 years ago! So we got his information and we'll be able to work with him! How cool is that?! 
This may be a hard week for Hermana Vila because more and more she is freaking out about going home next week. In a way it is good for me to see this side of her too because I've never been someone's last companion before, but I'm deciding that I am going to work absolutely the strongest I can right up to my last day. I remember Shaun being an assistant and he didn't even have time to pack up really. I think I'd prefer leaving like that!

Anyways, I love you and I hope you had a great Labor Day yesterday! We had a fun zone barbeque where they had assigned a lot of us to buy a pound of meat, so we had tons of delicious food and grilled it etc! Being a missionary is the coolest thing ever! I got to help out a lot of heating up the corn tortillas on the grill and cutting up the avacados etc. I think doing things like that makes me feel quite a bit more Latina because that is the type of food they eat all the time! Oh and Hermana Vila made me some Venezuelan food this week, so I may have to introduce you to some of it eventually.

Que Tenge el espiritu consigo para siempre! 
~Hermana Whetten