October
11, 2014
I have a lot to write about, but the
most significant and important thing is the miracle of finding my stuff…or most
of it. To recap, I lost one of my bags
(my messenger bag that I bought from the mission office) during our last
move. It must have either been left on
the sidewalk when we had to transfer all of the bags from the broken down truck
into another car. I was with the group
that pushed the broken truck and another set of Elders was responsible for
reloading the bags and transporting them in the other car to the new house. When
we got to our new place, my bag was missing and I was so disappointed because
it had my scriptures in it, not to mention
my camera, journals, photos from home, and a ton of stuff that is only
meaningful to me. I went about a week without
my things and was just super stressed about it.
After lots of prayer (my family at home included), I decided that I
needed to look for my stuff. So we went
back to our old neighborhood and started asking every single one of our
neighbors if they had seen my bag. While
I was doing this, I received a very strong impression that we should knock on
this door that I have never really noticed before. I asked the man who answered the door if he
had seen my bag, and he said that he would ask his wife. I don’t know why, but right then I said a
prayer that God would soften their hearts.
SOFTEN THEIR HEARTS?? Yeah, kindof weird to ask for that, but after
about 10 minutes the woman came to the door and handed me all of my stuff in a
plastic bag. I didn’t ever tell them
what was INSIDE of my bag, but there it was.
Everything (except the actual bag and the camera). I am sure that they pawned all the valuable
stuff, but why did they keep all the other stuff for over a week, the stuff
that is meaningless to other people but invaluable to me? I am sure that was a miracle, and believe me
I was ECSTATIC! God really does care
about the details of our life and he will answer our prayers,
specifically. He also expects us to do
our part in following inspiration and working to solve our problems with all
the tools that we have available to us.
Some of the other things that I missed
out on writing this week: Elder Yarrington bought a guitar for me. I gave him some money and when he was on
splits in the city, he found a guitar!!!
It is the best buy of my whole mission.
I am loving it, especially in light of our new p-day rules. Also, we
don’t have a piano in our area so I can’t even practice that on p-day. We do have an electronic keyboard organ for
church, but we don’t have keys to the building so I can’t practice. I get to play almost every Sunday because the
organist is less active, which means that I am getting good at site reading
hymns and playing organ (minus foot peddles)
Our president has a bunch of new rules: no soccer, movies
of any kind, meeting with more than 4 other missionaries, playing any sports
with members, card games of any kind, all types of martial arts, and basically
everything else that is fun to do on p-day. There
are a LOT of unhappy elders right now, but I'm just glad that I'm not one of
them. Not being able to meet with a bunch of elders on p-day is a rule that's
been in place ever since I came to Brasil. I think that it's because a lot of
elders were seriously messing around big time. My bishop has met a couple times
with the MP and the bishop said that our president likes me, but I still have
yet to see that. Haha, we'll find out soon because we're having interviews with
him this week.
Another fun thing that we did today was go in on some ice
cream. Prestigio, black forest, pineapple
– everyone got their favorites and we bought 15 liters for only about 4$
each. Transfers came out this week and
we were almost unaffected as a zone.
Only one person left. I am glad
because Elder Yarrington needs more time to learn the language before he is
sent to a new area. He is making really
good progress, but I don’t want him thrown under a bus without language
survival skills. I always feel
protective about the missionaries that I train, probably because I wished that
someone would have taken better care of me when I was new.
Well, I have taken up most of my personal study time to
get caught up in my journal. I really missed having it and I am so grateful to
have it back.
No comments:
Post a Comment