Hello,
Can you believe it?!? I've been at the MTC for a month already. It is so amazing how quickly the time passes.
As an update I am now a solo sister. My companions Hermana Davis and Hermana Captain finally got their visas last night so they left bright and early this morning. Being a solo sister means that I am the only Hermana in my district and so now I teach our investigators with a companionship of elders and on Preparation days and gym times and such I am with other sisters in my zone. It's cool because it's kind of like I belong to two different districts at the same time, also kind of like I have 11 companions instead of 1. I don't know how being a solo sister will ultimately turn out but I know that the Lord has something specific for me to learn out of this. I've been praying for acceptance of God's will and the ability to recognize what I need to learn. All I know at this point is that it is going to be a really interesting learning experience and I'm excited to see where it takes me.
We had the opportunity to hear from Sister Julie B. Beck at our Tuesday night devotional this week. It was amazing. She talked a lot about how the family is the center of everything in the church. I wish I had my notes with me so I could share a lot more of what I learned there but I don't. One thing though, her husband shared his experience as a missionary in Italy and he talked about how when he served in Rome there were only a handful of members and how they would struggle to find people to teach. He and his companion would set up on a corner and would teach to whoever would listen until the police chased them off and then they would take the bus and move somewhere else until the police chased them off. It was like that all day every day basically. But then he discussed how miraculous it is that membership has gone (in the last 20 years or so) from a handful to enough for there to be a temple in Rome. How miraculous is that! It really testifies to me of how the Lord prepares people to hear the gospel and how no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing. This is also evident in cities now having 2 temples. (Can't tell you how excited I am about the Provo tabernacle becoming a temple. It truly is a miracle!)
I want to share with you something I learned on Tuesday during my personal study. The night before I had prayed about what I should study and the topic of charity came to me. So I did a Topical Guide search of Charity. And the first reference is a scripture in Leviticus that talks about loving your neighbor as your self. Then I looked at all the other scriptures in paranthesis after Leviticus in the TG and there were 9 other scriptures that talked about loving your neighbor as yourself and how it was like unto loving God with all your heart. There were also a couple that talked about how loving your enemies is so important. Well as I was reading I felt struck by how all of these things are interelated. Love yourself, love your neighbor, love your enemy, love God. And then I was struck by how loving your neighbor, enemy, and God all start at loving yourself. The scriptures say love your neighbor as yourself. Well, if you don't love yourself as you should then how can you adequately love your neighbors or your enemies and more importantly how can you love God? So, I decided then that I am going to work harder at loving myself by not getting down on myself when it comes to learning the language (it's okay to make mistakes) and by not comparing my progress to that of other missionaries. I feel that if I do these things then I will be a better servant of the Lord. So my question to you all is, what can you do this week to better love yourself?
Oh random thing that happened this week. I moved into a new room and one night we were talking about our teachers and one of our other roommates happened to overhear us and she asked us if we were in intermediate spanish and then asked who our teacher was. We said Hermano Lewis and she was like NO WAY I dated him in high school and I'm best friends with his sister. The LDS world is incredibly small. And needless to say we now know too much about our teacher becaue she likes to give little stories about him at night. It's kind of interesting to me how that all worked out.
Anyway, I wish I had a funny story to share with you today but I will try to have one for next week.
I hope you all have a terrific week.
Love you,
Hermana Hansen
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