11 Months!

Wow, I am so behind on these posts! I've been pretty busy, but let's be honest, I've just been kind of lazy about posting these haha. I have about 4 weeks worth of emails to catch up on, but I'll do two of them in this post and two of them in another just to spare all of you from reading a novel. May has been quite the month! Finished my freshman year, went to Germany (it was amazing!), turned 19 and started summer semester. School never ends. It's been a good past couple of weeks though, and I'm excited that summer is starting to get into full swing. I got cleared to start playing full contact while we were in Germany, so that's super exciting!! I'm going to be training with some younger Avalanche teams to get back into the swing of playing again. I'm excited and nervous because it's been like seven months since I last played fully. I'm sure that with some time I'll be back to myself though. Mikel seems to be doing really well! Loving his area in Lesotho and the people in it. He and Elder Woodland seem to get along really well, too. Oh yeah, he's been out for 11 months now which is INSANE!

To start out, I got to skype with him on mother's day! Well, sort of. You see, my flight to Germany was leaving that Saturday morning when he chose to skype (that flight didn't actually leave, but that's another story) so I was most likely going to miss it. BUT his family is the best ever and face timed me while they were skyping him so I got to see and hear him! It was hard to hear but it was good to see him. He's definitely developed an accent now haha. Right before I got to the airport his dad held the phone up to the screen so we could see each other so I said bye and blew him a kiss and apparently made him cry, according to sources haha. He's a cutie. <3

So, I'll start from the beginning of the month!
May 9th

"We get lonely sometimes.."

"Tea and biscuits anyone?"

"This was a pretty great week,

Nelson and his wife had their baby!!!! woot woot, the moment we have been waiting for, they named the baby hlonolofatso, which means blessing from God, they gave their beautiful daughter this name because they say when she was pregnant the missionaries came and brought blessings from God. So needless to say it was awesome and the baby is so cute! okay not gonna lie. lil black babies are so much cuter than lil white babies..... 

We are excited to be able to start to teach them again as they go home this afternoon, and we hope we can get them married and baptized by the 19th of next month!!!! ah this family is amazing and I love them so bad."

"Happy mothers day to all you mothers out there! so my Mme is the best, she is just amazing. I would come home from long days of school and find her in my room just waiting for me to come home so we could have a few minutes to talk. she some how found time to come to my soccer games and other events even with all 9 children running around. I was never excluded or fell through the cracks, which is amazing considering all of the responsibility that she has. I love my mom so much and she has been the biggest blessing in my life. she has always showed me what is important in life and taught me so much by the way she has lived her life. I love my mommy so much and I know she is the best mom in the world. I would not trade her for anyone! not ever!

I love this gospel and it has brought such a light in my life, I have seen that light spread to others as they find the same joy from the gospel. Its true, and oh so good! I love you all and keep on going!"

May 16th

"So this week seemed pretty chilled, We saw Nelson and his family like 4 times this week so that was cool, but we have run into a bit of a hiccup it seems. So because of tradition it can be hard to get married sometimes, you have to get it approved by the Elders of the family which sometimes live far away so you need to go see them. Then you have to have your traditional wedding which can take time and then you also have to pay labola, paying the family money so you can marry the girl. Its hectic and long and the cause for many people to just not get married at all. So we are still working with them to try and get it all sorted as fast as possible.

I had the wonderful chance to interview a young women for baptism. Her name is Liako and she is a student at the EMT class Elder Woodland and I teach at. She was interested in the gospel after a few lessons with her so we referred her to the other missionaries who work in her area. She has since then progressed so amazingly. She immediately stopped and broke old habits and hasn’t missed a day of church, she even skipped going to South Africa to shoot a music video so she could be at church. She is amazing! She gets baptized next week and it looks like I will be the one who will be blessed with walking into the freezing cold waters with her and I can't wait. It is when you see someone like her change so much and progress so far so quick that makes everything so worth it. I would gladly have 100 more rejections to find just one person! Whoo I am so excited!!!!!"

This was my favorite thing that he had to say in his email this week: "We also had a nice DDM this week. I taught about unity and why and how. We also talked about how having unity with our companion isn’t just an option, it is a choice we made when we accepted our call to be a missionary. We played a game to test how well we knew our companions and that was fun, I think it went well and will be a lesson that they remember.

Another thought that I read about that keeps coming to my mind is how when we leave on mission we pack up our life and put it in the closet, now this is very literal for a lot of things, our cloths, or toys, our every possession is put into boxes and stored. We don’t only store material things though. We store our hobbies, our music, Movies, Friends, and more. We pack them up and leave them behind for now. We don’t forget about them but we don’t pull them out of the boxes. Now when we come home from mission we see that some of the cloths don’t fit, or some we don’t want. The same applies to the other things we pack up, we may decide the music we listened to before is not what we want now, some of the friends we had before might not be what we need and our lives change, but after mission we unpack it all and we find a lot that we do keep and love still. The key is that we don’t unpack our bags on mission. I don’t know if this made sense or not, but it comes from an amazing talk called “the fourth missionary” and he does a better job at describing it.

https://annathemissionary.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/lawrence-corbridge-the-fourth-missionary.pdf

I have been blessed to be able to see the impact of the gospel on many peoples lives, including my own. I know that the spirit works through each of us as we give it place to. I know that God is waiting to answer us and probably already has, we just need to listen. He loves you! I love this gospel, I love everything about mission, I love these people, I love being able to serve my Lord and my God, I love the growth, I love the experience, I love the change, I love the hard work, I love the whole of it and it dosen't get much better than this."

I love getting his emails every week to read his testimony and see how much his mission has changed and helped him.