Zdravo!
Thank you for the emails and updates! I love hearing from
you guys (it feels nice to say the word 'guys' because we're not supposed to
use it here).
Arianne and Jackson, you two are the worst at emailing me,
but I knew that would be the case before I left haha :) Love you guys! Hope all
is well!
Kendra and Oli, the package was seriously a life-saver! And
the sisters in my district enjoyed the cookies a lot! I had two miracle
packages within the last week. One from Kendra and one from Rick McCloskey. I
know the Lord is very aware of me because they each came on a day when I was
having a really hard time and feeling pretty lonely. Thank you for taking care
of me!
So this week has been good! I think I'll write in categories
again.
Basketball:
I haven't even bought a ROC pass in two years, but I'm
STOKED about the BYU GU game :) YOu may have thought that I was going to
say I've been playing basketball during my exercise time, but such is not the
case haha. That would be bad for everyone involved. I think I'm getting
stronger because last week I could do two three sets of 20 pushups and now I'm
doing sets of 25! Still a far cry from 70, but I've still got seven weeks here,
so maybe I can get there...
Language Study:
The language is killer. And I don't feel like I'm
progressing very much. We had our first TRC experience last night where church
members come in and you just have a 20 minute discussion about the gospel. It
was great! I shared with Jack and Jake about faith and the power that it brings
to our lives. I'll mention more on that in a bit. I have a long ways to go
before I can even have a decent conversation in this language, so if anyone has
any study tips for me, I would appreciate it. Speaking of languages, we got to
host new missionaries yesterday! Which is funny because I still feel like a new
missionary. But I helped a sister who is going to Australia speaking....MANDARIN!
So I got to help her calm down and get her bearings and told her that she'll do
great and love the language. And I told her that Drew loves it :) Then I had to
drop her off in her classroom where her teacher wouldn't speak any English, so
after all my hard work to calm her down, he got her all freaked out again. The
new missionaries will do great though!
Meal times:
I need to learn to be more like Kyle. Sestra Orchard and I
always get to meals on time, but somehow it takes us an AGE to get our food.
Don't know how haha, but we'll try to sit at the table our zone sits at and
there is never any space for us by the time we have our food. So we make new
friends. And we must take forever to eat or something too because we're always
the LAST ONES eating. But that gives me ample time to see all my friends who
work in the MTC cafeteria! I see Andrew Stewart relatively often. I see Kaiden
Cloward (son of a man I worked with over the summer). And I see Lara ... from
Spanish Fork and she totally knows Cass! Cass, I told her to give you a big hug
for me next time she sees you on campus!
Church:
Sestra Orchard and I were assigned to be Sacrament meeting
greeters. They assigned us Sunday morning, so we figured we could go to
sacrament twenty minutes early and do that. Logical, right? And then the
sisters came in and asked if I would accompany the special musical number that
the Polish Elders were singing. First off, I don't know how to accompany. I
barely know how to play the piano. Second, I get serious stage fright when I'm
playing in front of people. Third, I've never accompanied anything in my life.
Fourth, same as first! Anyway, so after lunch Sestra Orchard and I went to
sacrament early so I could practice and then we could greet. The Elders were in
there preparing the sacrament. I practiced a bit and got my nerves down some
and then we went to the doors to greet. The clock kept ticking and ticking and
no one was showing up...finally, at three minutes til we decided that we must
be in the wrong place although we had been positive it was the right room. So
we scoured the building until we found our entire zone in a different room
(looked exactly the same) with President Bradford at the pulpit starting the
meeting :( Oops! So my nerves shot straight back up again and the practicing
was all for naught :) But I think it went alright anyway. Now Sestra O. and I
are sitting here laughing at the memory.
Random:
I had a neat little miracle this week. I wanted to have
charity, right? I had just finished writing in my journal about how I needed to
be motivated by charity. And when we ask Heavenly Father to bless us with
things, He does it by giving us opportunities to work for those things. As soon
as I had closed my journal, Sister McColm said that we should all do our hair
for church the next day (we don't do our hair very often). And then Sister
Christenson said that the only thing she knows how to do with her hair is two
braids. So I offered to teach her how to curl her hair and she let me do it the
next morning! I know that's kind of silly, but it actually meant a lot to me
that Heavenly Father immediately gave me an opportunity to serve someone else.
There's a picture of Sestra C. and myself at the temple on my google drive
:)
Faith brings Power:
Okay, I had a thought this morning while Sestra O. and I
were in the temple. Let me tell you about this ridiculous cycle that I have
OFTEN found myself doing in my life, especially the last four years while I've
been in school:
School is really tough and your life gets swamped with
schoolwork and studying. You feel stressed about dating and trying to find the
right person. You want to be involved in social things and make friends but you
can hardly justify it because of school. Classes get so overwhelming that you
feel like you're going to fail. You feel like it's all on you to make it
through things. Am I the only one failing here? Everyone around me seems like
they're doing great.
And then you realize that you're going about everything the
wrong way. You realize that the Lord can and will help you, but you feel that
you've kind of been neglecting him. You haven't been studying your scriptures
or saying sincere prayers. You haven't been looking for opportunities to serve
other people or listening for the Spirit. You have a whole list of things that
you know you should be doing, but you haven't been. So you start doing them.
But there's just so much to do and it's hard to ever feel like you're doing
enough. And school is still there weighing you down. And now you're stressed
again because you don't feel like you're doing enough in order to receive the
Lord's help.
So what's the problem here? Here's what I've realized and
what we've been taught by Brother Wilcox in the talk His Grace is Sufficient:
There is no quantifiable amount of how much we need to do in order to get the
Lord's help. There is no "if I do X amount then the Lord will help with
the rest." Here's how it actually works: If we turn our hearts to the
Lord, He WILL help us. And as we turn our hearts to Him in faith, our desires
will change and we will have greater desire to do the things that bring us
closer to Him. We don't study our scriptures in order to prove to the Lord that
we did it so now we're entitled to His help. We study our scriptures because we
have faith in Jesus Christ and we want to be closer to Him. And the more we
turn to Him and exercise faith in Him, the more our desires to come close to
Him will grow and our will begins to align with His. He has already paid the
full price and He asks us to turn to Him and come to know him. There is a verb
in Slovene that means to come to know someone - spoznate. SPOZ NAH TAY. I love
it.
And as we turn to the Lord and exercise our faith in Him, we
can know with surety that the promises He has made will come to pass. Jesus
Christ is quoted in Moroni 7:33. It says "If ye will have faith in me ye
shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me." How amazing
is that! Whatsoever is expedient in the Lord, we will have power to do through
our faith in Him. So my scripture of the week is D&C 123:17. Turn to the
Lord, do all things cheerfully, and then you will have peace in your heart
because you have 'utmost assurance' that the Lord's promises to you are sure.
Allow yourself to stand with utmost assurance in the Lord.
I love you all! And now, if there are faults they are the
mistakes of a rushed missionary who has three languages rushing through her
head; wherefore, condemn not the things of Sestra Brown.
Love,
Sestra Brown :)
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