Email 53 - "One Very Smiley Missionary"

That´s the really awesome view from a member´s house where we ate this week. So pretty! 

And there is my favorite older couple ever, good ole Lola and Roberto. I LOVE them. We made them a little nervous by taking photos, they thought we were getting transferred, haha. I don´t know when I´ll have to, but I already know it´ll be crazy hard to say goodbye to them.

That´s their daughter and a 12-yr-old friend of ours (María Jose´s son, Haorán) in the shot, too. 

Hello!

You all sound great! Between those really great emails and the major endorfins I´ve got pumping from playing my first game of ultimate frisbee in a year are making me one very smiley missionary, haha. I discovered this week that one of the members has a frisbee (can´t find them anywhere!), so our district took advantage of that and played 3 on 3 for a couple hours this morning. I haven´t run like that in a long time, haha. Hna Irigoyen picked it up like a champ.

Updates? Yes?

Things are still looking a little gloomy with our buddy F----o. He´s still not answering his phone for us or the member he got really close to, and the last thing we heard was, "you´re good girls. I´ll probably tell you someday what happened." *click*

We were worried something similar was happening with Y-----a´s family when, after 2 weeks of not seeing them, we set an appt to take the hour bus ride to her house, and she canceled on us as we got to her street. BUT then her whole family showed up to church yesterday! WOOHOOOOOOO!!! 

And A--a is in Madrid enjoying (hopefully) her first EFY. :) If it´s anything like the experience it sounds like B-rad just had, I think we can count on her being a little more pumped about baptism when she gets back!

D---a and her family are all doing really great. We started off our most recent lesson with our family photo, and I explained the blessings our family can claim because of the Restored Gospel. It was fun listening to D---a and G------i rattling off all of the blessings they could think of. I think that really caught C-----a´s (their nonmember mom) attention. And we referred back to those blessings throughout the lesson as we talked about dispensations, the Great Apostasy, and the miracle of the Restoration.

N-----a hasn´t been able to come to church lately because her family keeps planning last-minute family outings for Sunday mornings- which is not a good sign on how her mom´s been taking the idea of N--i joining the church. But she seems to be progressing really well aside from that, and when she´s not surrounded by the Young Women, she´s constantly What´sApp-ing them (that´s the text messaging app that, from what I´m hearing, every country aside from the US uses, haha).

We also helped an old investigator named L---a with the craziest move I´ve ever helped with. I kid you not, she had an entire room full of boxes. Not like, twelve boxes scattered on the floor kind of full, either. We´re talking stacks of rows of towers of heckadays lotta boxes, haha, and they each had a dead cow or at least something equally heavy inside of them. We did our best to help with everything else as the poor Elders hauled each of those suckers, a fridge, a washing machine, an oven, cases of water, and 10+ bookcases/dressers up a flight of stairs (thank goodness 3/4ths of them are mountain-western football players, haha). The poor lady´s landlord had told her that morning that she had to have everything out by the end of the day, so she was definitely grateful for the help, and then showed up to Relief Society the next day!

Unfortunately, other than that, there´s not much news. Hna Irigoyen is still learning how to drop her ´t´s and speak in American slang (props to the Elders), and she´s recently picked up saying "geez," my most recent exclamation of choice. She, however, says, "cheese!" and then giggles for a while everytime, haha. The members get a kick out of it, so no worries.  And I´m being told that I´m starting to talk a little in the sing-songy Spanish that Argetinians use....

That all being said, it was still another kind of rough week, and Hna Irigoyen and I are both feeling like there´s a lot we can improve. On Thursday, we had the most optimistic motivational speech/pep talk of a zone training ever from the Muellers´ friend, Elder Laughbaugh, and and Elder who turns out to be a friend of the Webbers, Elder Gentry. They challenged us all to do mini companionship inventories every night to try to improve something everyday, and that´s been surprisingly helpful.

One thing we read in the training was D&C 108:7- "Therefore, strengthen your brethren in all your conversation, in all your prayers, in all your exhortations, and in all your doings."

That´s our new focus for working with members, investigators, fellow missionaries, etc. 

Then, yesterday, a YSA friend of ours, A-i T----s, gave a talk on Christlike communication. She used us missionaries as an example, talking about how friendly and enthusiastically we talk to everyone as missionaries, even if we´re talking to someone we´d rather not be around, haha. I realized that, while that´s true, it´s all really easy to do just because of the nametag I´ve got on. Almost everyone in the world knows how a girl dressed in a long skirt and wearing a nametag with the Savior´s name on it should act.  My hope is that I can remember that, as a member of the church, even after the mission, I´ve still got a label on me as a disciple of Christ, and hopefully it´ll be just as easy to keep this up!

Thanks again for the emails and photos this week :) I love you guys tons!!!!

And I´m sending a request for recordings :) I´d love to hear from you all! I don´t even care what you talk about or anything... maybe B-radster can tell me a little more about his week at EFY or something :)

Love,

Hna Grover