Hi family! I love you/miss you! Clark will have to tell me about EFY when he gets back. I know I had the time of my life there. I just got a letter today from one of my first EFY roommates Janna who's on a mission too in San Jose California. I wish I had time to respond to everything you wrote in your e-mail!
Hi everybody! Hope everyone had a fabulous week! I'm glad to hear of all the exciting events in everyone's lives! To those to whom it applies, pictures would be nice. You know who you are. :-)
Today we got to go to the temple again! It was great! I needed it. It was just so peaceful there. I could really feel the Spirit. When you're there, you're just completely away from the world. It's a good place to put your priorities straight.
My new companion is from Indiana so the heat is really getting to her. She'll get used to it. It's getting upper 90's and everyone just laughs and says about 10-15 degrees hotter until it gets cooler. I'm used to it but my companion isn't. She's also a red-head so fairer skin. We'll have to do good on sunscreen. She's doing great. She's not afraid to talk to people and she's got a good sense of humor. She'll be fun.
I love little kids! We had a dinner appointment this week and the 6 year old had made us placement cards. Ours said "Misheinery." I taped that one in my journal.
Nancy, who has been doing really well, has had some bad influences in the past few weeks apparently and, according to her mother-in-law, does not want to meet with us anymore. That hurts. I have seen the blessings that come from the gospel and the change it makes on people's lives and to see them choosing to go in the opposite direction is hard. When she was progressing we could see her family come closer together and strengthening bonds and she was happier. Now she doesn't even talk to her mother-in-law. We are praying for her. We can do all we can for people but like I've said before, we cannot take away their agency. We cannot force people to believe. That was Satan's plan. Sometimes it's easy to see why that would have seemed like a good idea to some. But that is not the way to true happiness and eternal life. You have to keep reminding yourself of that as a missionary. That's one of the things you learn on a mission. You also learn not to compare which is hard. Every week we have different times where we report some of the things we keep track of (e.g. lessons taught, new investigators, etc.) and we also make goals every week that we report the next week at district meeting. You need to try as hard as you can to complete that goal while also realizing when you've done all you can but the people you teach exercise their ability to choose not in the way you would have hoped. It's harder when other companionships seem to be meeting and even exceeding their goals every week. But one of the things it says in our Preach My Gospel book is AVOID COMPARING YOURSELF WITH OTHER MISSIONARIES!!!! That's good advice throughout your life. You're a lot happier when you don't compare yourself with other people. Everyone is different. No two people are the same. As long as you're trying YOUR best, what should it matter how anyone else does? Don't get me wrong, I am NOT perfect at this. This is my conscience speaking.
We did have some small miracles this week. An inactive member and her nonmember husband who we're teaching came to sacrament meeting! It's kind of funny how we started teaching him. We had visited Sister Clark but her husband never sat in. But you could always tell he was listening because he always came in as soon as we were done. We invited Sister Clark on a church tour. She said her husband wouldn't come, but he did, surprisingly. He accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon on the tour and said he would read it and pray about it. The next lesson Sister Clark said he wasn't feeling well and was in his room. I had an idea. We told her that we had a song to sing them and would her husband like to hear it. She said “Oh, I’ll call him.” He came right in and we sand a hymn and had a lesson. The next lesson we got him to sit in and watch the Restoration DVD. The last lesson we had with him, he sat in without being asked. Amazing.
Also this Sunday, another sister who's been less active came to church and even bore her testimony!
I hope everyone knows that our Heavenly Father is a God of miracles. He was in the Bible times and He is the same today as he was back then. He has just as much power as he did back then and I'm pretty sure he doesn't love us any less than he loved those people. And I'd say we need Him now more than ever. We might not recognize miracles we see daily, but they're there.
The church is true
the sky is blue
the temperature's approaching
one-hundred and two!
Have a great week everybody!
Hermana Evans
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