Oraciones contestadas

Mi Familia,

This week was hard and good. I'm happy to be past nine months...the mission's great but it's also nice to know that I can for sure do nine more months because I've already done it before! If that makes any sense.

We FINALLY had an investigator at church yesterday!! It was another one of Hermana Trevino's friends, Carole. She's been really searching for a church for a while. She tried out a pentecostal church a while back and was super turned off/discouraged by the speaking-in-tongues stuff. I hope yesterday was a better experience.

Marilyn and Jerry are out of town. I sure hope they're reading. Rosie has been super sick and Eloy has something weird going on that required him to get and MRI. Everyone's still kind of dangling, but we're working hard to give them a chance to accept and act. And if they won't, we'll just have to have faith to let them go and let other missionaries pick them up someday. 

Sister Montgomery shared something awesome with me in comp study the other day. She was reading Elder Bednar's conference talk and changed a few words to fit missionary work. I'll copy and paste it and add the changes so you can see:

"Often as we teach and testify about [missionary work] we emphasize the immediate, dramatic, and readily recognizable temporal blessings that we receive. And surely such blessings do occur. Yet some of the diverse blessings we obtain as we are obedient to this commandment are significant but subtle. Such blessings can be discerned only if we are both spiritually attentive and observant...

...We may need and pray for help to find [new investigators]. Eyes and ears of faith are needed, however, to recognize the spiritual gift of enhanced discernment that can empower us to identify [teaching] opportunities that many other people might overlook—or the blessing of greater personal determination to search harder and longer for [people to teach] than other people may be able or willing to do. We might want and expect a [family to teach], but the blessing that comes to us through heavenly windows may be greater capacity to act and change our own circumstances rather than expecting our circumstances to be changed by someone or something else.

We may appropriately desire and work to [have high numbers]. Eyes and ears of faith are required, however, to notice in us an increased spiritual and temporal capacity to do more with less, a keener ability to prioritize and simplify [and plan], and an enhanced ability to take proper care of the [investigators and members] we already have acquired. We might want and expect a [teaching pool], but the blessing that comes to us through heavenly windows may be greater capacity to change our own circumstances rather than expecting our circumstances to be changed by someone or something else."

I've been able to see this first-hand. We've been working so hard and seeing virtually no results. But we have become SO much better at planning, working with members, and taking time to serve the one. Our work isn't great in quantity, but it is great in quality. We depend more on Christ and have more faith that His help will come. Pretty awesome.

And we are seeing results, maybe just different ones than we imagined. Like the members of the branches--especially the English branch--and really getting on board with the whole "member missionary" thing. Which is awesome, because it's clear that that's how Heavenly Father wants His work to be done. 

Anyway, missionary work is good. Really hard, often tedious, and far from perfect, but good. 

Love you all. Keep on keepin' on and share the gospel!

Hermana Lund