Wednesday, October 15, 2014

MIRACLE STORY: How my lost scriptures were found


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. 

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