Monday, September 23, 2013

Day of Chile

September 23, 2013

So this week was a crazy one full of fighting sisters (scary, lots of tears and no sleep..... just love your comp and respect them) almost dying twice (ok exaggeration lets just say abandoned apartment building trying to find people on the ward list. and homeless man almost chasing after us who only wears like a million trash bags!) so that was exciting, getting new roommates so now there are six of us (party! as if we were crazy enough already hahaha ) lots of parties/lunches for the Day of Chile ( I have never eaten so much meat and empanadas in my life!)
 
 I no longer am eating sweets.  One of our recent converts started smoking again and now we are not eating sweets to help him not smoke.  Every time we want to eat sweets we call him and he calls us every time he wants to smoke.  Like today he called us and said, “I am feeling the spirit in my life again” and i was like aw he is growing up -  best ever.

 This week we had zone conference and a member of the Seventy came. I want to share my favorite part of his message. There are three things that can stop us progressing and they are 1) sin, 2) lack of faith, and 3) not having the desire to serve.  He talked about how all of these come from a lack of love and that really hit me hard.  We need to work on charity and all the rest will follow.  All that God does is done because He loves us and that if we want to become like God  we must learn to do everything out of love. Also in zone conference our mission president talked about how the Children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years and it was only an eleven day trip.  He talked about how sometimes people take 40 year trips for things that only take 11 days and asked us to self-reflect and see if we have any 40 year journeys in our life.  Cause when we think we are doing things the easy way the way, but it is not God’s will it might take us forty years, but when we submit to God’s will and live how we should we get to take the 11 day journey. It was a neat take on the story of the Children of Israel.

So this Sunday I had the neatest experience. I had a question that I really needed answered and I fasted and prayed and it was the neatest thing how everything at church was exactly what I needed to hear.  It was cool cause I was forced to pay attention cause I was translating (that is so hard by-the-way) , but with practice I’ll get better cause there is a couple that is here and they don’t speak Spanish so they stopped coming to church. Now I translate for them so they can get something out of church.  We also started to have a Sunday school class in English too so they can get more out of church.  some things that I learned was that we need to be merciful to others if we want to receive mercy and that forgiving others brings peace into our lives. That my friends is so true - others can hurt you, but you can still love them and remember that they too are children of God and that God wants to forgive them and we should too. Well I love being a missionary so much and it’s one of the hardest things I have ever done, but it is so very fun.  I love being here cause I am growing so much and I have such a long ways to go.  So something fun that I did this week was I took my eternal goals I had written and I found a scripture for each one of them.  It was neat to make sure my eternal goals were aligned with God’s plan for us.  I challenge all of you to do that too.  It’s a neat experience. Well love you so much!


Hermana Jennings


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