Letter to the President

Hey hey,

sorry i couldn't bust out another letter to you guys-out of time. but here is a piece from my letter to the president.

Dear President Klebingat,

Something happened this week. And I know we talked about not expecting anything to happen this week as far as me all the sudden being happy, so I won't call it anything big or monumental or life changing, but something happened this week. It really wasn't an event, i just woke up Thursday morning and as i was reflecting for a minute before i started morning study, i stopped for a minute to try to describe this weird feeling i had. My heart...its just still. My heart is still. I haven't felt that since ive been here. I think its was just finally a culmination of all my realizations/revaluations from the past few months topped with your phone call Tuesday night and a great talk with one of our ward mission leaders on Wednesday night, so by Thursday i could feel this. My heart is simply still. the whole plea of the hymn "be still my soul" happened. and my heart can rest from the fury and storm it has been feeling. My actions aren't monumentally different right now, but my mentality is a little clearer. I have hope. I am here to see miracle, so that is what i will work for. The results probably won't be visible by the end of a transfer or maybe the end of the mission, but Heavenly Father knows where i need to be, who i need to talk to and he can see the end from where im at. So i just need to keep walking forward with my head up.

We also had an interesting experience with one of our investigators a couple days ago that i think will change me as a missionary. We made this woman on the street a month or two ago and she recognized us as missionaries right away, she said she met with missionaries a long time ago, knew all about us, and invited us to come over again. We did and found out she has her book of Mormon, all marked up with notes, she has the book 'teachings of the prophet Spencer w Kimball" all highlighted and noted, and she has a huge stack of liahonas. wow, we were blown away. after a lesson on baptism and especially baptisms for the dead, we committed her to being baptized. Sweet! talk about prepared, right? well after a few more visits we started to see her intelligence taking over the simplicity of the spirit. She's kinda been trained by the Jehovah witnesses and how to read the bible, so she was throwing a lot of scriptures at us throughout our lessons that kinda disrupted what we wanted to teach her. It was my fault, i now realize, that i assumed since she was so educated and had been taught before, she knew about all the commitments-Sabbath day, word of wisdom, etc, so we just did one lesson where we committed her to live them without much detail. Well, we noticed she really wasn't living the word of wisdom, saying, 'if i want to have a drink once in a while with my friends, that's fine" and she was shocked when we told her we don't buy things on Sunday. LIke i said, my bad for assuming she knew it all from before. So we had a lesson with her on Saturday and i was compelled by the spirit to lay it down for her,"anya, you are not going to get baptized in a week. You are not ready to get baptized. Yes you are very smart, and you know the scriptures, but you don't live what you say you believe. You say you know about the word of wisdom and you can probably quote many scriptures in the bible about how sacred our body is, but you need to do something about that belief, 100% of the time you don't drink. You need to show God your faith through actions. He gave us a body so that we can LIVE according to the commandments, not just learn about them. anya, i love you, i love that you are smart, and i know you have a desire to get baptized and to help do baptisms for the dead, but as a representative of Jesus Christ, i am telling you you need to live the commandments, not just study them and brush them off and say you know them. We are here to help you prepare for baptism, and we want to, so please, we want to continue meeting with you and help you show your faith through your works" wow. i know. but she needed to hear that and more importantly, i needed to say it. i needed to see what happens when i don't take teaching our investigators the letter of the law, every aspect of commandments seriously. I am more dedicated and see where i need to be soooo thorough in my teaching of the commandments especially in preparing for baptism. And to relate to the feeling of my heart being still -i feel like i needed to say what i needed to say to her, so i have no regrets or uncertainty about working with her. we committed her to read the book of Mormon again, from 1nephi1, and we are going to start from scratch with her, re teaching everything thoroughly so that she knows and i know that we taught her right. And then we can watch to see if she keeps commitments and see if she really understands. I know my "uncertainty" about the work is one of the many things that has been troubling my soul, but now i have a little better grasp now that i have had to pull someone's baptism date away from them because they weren't ready and they couldn't see it (i promise she really isn't ready-she bought something on the way to church yesterday and didn't think anything of it and she was supposed to be baptized at the end of this week).

so yes, that's my confession but lesson ive learned about being a missionary and being sister little.