Thanks everyone for your faith and prayers in my behalf!! And your emails too!! Know that I am strengthened by them!!
This week has been awesome. I love this work!!!! These first weeks have to be the best because there is no better position to be in than The Vulnerable Gringa That Can’t Speak That Great. I think it sets the tone right when people realize I need help too! It makes it easier to demonstrate that my companion and I are not as much their teachers but truly their sisters. There’s a unity I feel when they realize how much I need them. I am seeing hearts open because I am so not threatening. Haha.
For example, one brother has, in the past, not wanted anything to do with the missionaries. His wife joined the Church but had to be taught outside her home. I don’t know what changed him, but he heard my companion and I singing in a home nearby (other plus to cardboard walls. Haha, just kidding, they were concrete) and he came over and asked us to visit him. We have been teaching him nearly every day since then and he is on fire!! I was scared of him at first from the stories I had heard, but now he is a dear friend. He has helped me so much with the language.
Things have been pretty crazy in Piura because this weekend was their independence day, and so the whole city was a gigantic fiesta. My companion and I went with an investigator and about 25 people from the ward to a neighboring ward last night to watch a baptism. The Spirit was so strong in that meeting as we watched the ordinance, sang hymns, and listened to testimony. Afterward, our investigator asked if she could change her baptismal date to this week!! It was so exciting, and when all of us from the ward were walking home there was such a feeling of unity. There was loud music coming from every direction and drunk people everywhere, but in our little band with the powerful Spirit we had just felt and the exciting news about our investigator, there was just such a feeling of love among us. We were all so content and safe.
I love this work and I love our Savior, Jesus Christ. I know that He is at the head of all of this, it’s a knowledge that burns within me and drives me to seek His will. I am learning the truth of the words of M. Russell Ballard that as Jesus Christ is becoming more of a reality in my life, it isn’t that He is somehow making me do things I don’t want to do. It’s that I am finding myself wanting to do what He would do, wanting to respond as He would respond, in an effort to bring my life more in harmony with His. The interesting thing that is happening to me is that as I am trying to follow the footsteps of Jesus (in caring, loving, serving, and obeying as He did) I am finding that this path is leading me directly to where I want to be. The people I need to talk to, the words I need to say, the hands that I can lift. It is a milagro!! A miracle!
I love you all! Thank you for the emails!
Hermana Cardon
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Flecks of Gold 