August 15, 2011

¡Hola todas!

This week has been amazing and I learned a HUGE lesson about diligence this week. My first 2 months in Chile were a little rough but amazing! Because of all the rough times and the hard days I learned so many great and important lessons and I could feel the spirit with me almost 100%. These past few weeks have been a little different. I´ve got comfortable with the mission life and living in Chile. When I got to that point I think I stopped giving it my all. I prayed for experiences to humble me because I just wanted to feel the spirit that strong again. Well I was thinking one night about the one goal that I have for me for my mission. I came on my mission to serve the Lord and do everything for him. The only thing that I wanted to gain was to establish good study habits and what I need to change to start that habit. I thought of the one thing that always keeps me from doing my studies and that is being lazy. It´s the little natural man or woman inside each of us that always wants to do the things that are comfortable are not stretch ourselves at all. There are a lot of things in the mission that I´m not comfortable with, like contacting, and knocking. One night this week I studied the Christ like attribute of diligence. I really can´t put into words what I learned or felt. If we have diligence we will have the spirit. Oh this is so difficult I wish I could just talk to you and explain it. But I learned this lesson in such a profound way that all I want to do now it WORK. Diligence also ties into our accountability. Here in the mission all of my time is the Lords time and at the end of the day I am accountable to the Lord for what I did with my time. I know I am so much happier at the end of the day when I can pray to God and literally tell him I did all I could. We can always improve but we can´t expect to do all of our improvement in one day. We should just do all we can do and as we do that we will find over time that we will be able to do more. Pres. Laycock always says to the next level and that we should all strive to reach our OWN next level. We shouldn´t compare ourselves to others but just look at what we can improve and continuously reach for the next level.

Other things that happened this week... It was the first week of the new change so I have a new district and Zone. My new district leader is awesome and he taught a great class on Thursday about how we can be better missionaries. Also on Saturday we had a Sector Slam in Los Platanos to try and have some lessons with less actives. Los Platanos is A LOT different that Ñuñoa 1 and there are a few parts that are much more dangerous for Hermanas at night. Don´t worry we weren´t there at night and I don´t think there will ever be Hermanas there because of that. The rest of the week was pretty much just walking, knocking, and occasionally teaching lessons.

I LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH!!!!

-Hna. Howe