Evergreen Avenue : Week 26: The Worth of Souls Is GREAT

I thought they only had these kind of hotdogs in China!! SO GOOD!!!!!! Yum yum yum

Che! Como te va?

Haha I just got laughed at by Hermana Aldana for sitting staring at the heading of this letter for probably a solid 20 minutes with a confused look not knowing what to say.. So much happened this week and I don’t think I have ever been this tired in my entire life.. Bear with me if this is all kind of random.

Hang in there got about 12 more months..

The area and our investigators are great! The people are so nice…the only struggle is dodging all of the food they try to feed us.. The struggle.. We always find some way out. We invited some of our new investigators to baptism and they said yes! We are so so excited!! They are so wonderful and God is so good. The ward is doing great too! I know that our success is because of their faith and unity in the ward. God is not going to give us precious souls if the ward is not strong, so I have been really grateful for this ward and their help.

"This is the wrong house!!" "Hurry just ask for Maria! There is always a Maria!" ..... There was a Maria.

This week I studied 2 things.. DyC 18:10 and the power of the atonement! I’ll start with DyC. This has been my favorite scripture since I was 12.. I think at the time probably because it’s short and I can’t memorize so I felt really cool being able to say the whole scripture by memory haha… But it is so simple and SO important! So it’s good that it is easy to memorize.. Maybe that was God’s idea. The worth of souls is GREAT. Each soul has infinite worth. We are ALL called as missionaries to bring souls home and it can be ANYONE.. a stranger, friend, or a sibling or spouse. The eternal joy is the SAME that the Savior promises in DandC 18:16. The coolest thing that will happen is that if we just remember to be an example there will be souls that we helped and we won’t even realize until the next life. Abinadi’s words resulted in Alma’s conversion which also led to a legacy of Book of Mormon prophets!! I also think that the soul we bring back home could very much be ours as well. We can all be examples and grow our faith every single day to help bring others unto Christ and also ourselves. If God clothes the fields knowing every single lily and takes care of them or if even Christ passes a fig tree in the way and saw that it wasn’t doing very well, not growing fruit, He said unto it, “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever.” And it withered away.. Him having compassion for the poor tree (for me, putting it out of its misery), you can only imagine or I guess not even imagine or comprehend how much love He has for your soul, or your friend’s soul.

This scripture can also help us obtain Christ-like attributes of loving and serving others when we remember that their souls are precious to our Heavenly Father. The reason I studied this verse more this week was because I was caught guilty of judging someone.. There is a lady that my comp has been teaching for a while and when I first met her I was a little judgmental because she is a very strong, tough, frank lady.. Not going to lie she kind of scared me! Well we decided to go teach her this one day, my comp feeling very strongly that we needed to go see her, me thinking in my head, “NONONO.” We walked to her house and I was just dreading it and then DandC 18:10 popped in my head. I think God put it in my mind saying, “Knock it off and remember she is my daughter too.” Well, we got there and we had a lesson planned… But she seemed very grumpy and cold so we decided to just talk to her for a minute. I saw a picture of her holding a baby lion and flipped out and we started asking her some questions about her life! She has traveled SO much! Her apartment is my dream home.. Covered in paintings, TONS of books, pictures etc.. I feel like I was just running around like a kid at Christmas looking at everything saying, “What’s this?!” “Oh that’s from my trip to Asia.” “Who’s that?!” “That’s a painting of my dog’s mother’s mother.” (True story) “You held a baby lion?! How?! Where?! WHEN!!” She then brought out a bunch of photo albums and was laughing and smiling telling us memories. We learned a lot about her.. about her life and a lot of hard trials she has had to go through. She may be tough on the outside, but she truly is the sweetest, most incredibly strong woman I know! We talked about the power of the Atonement and enduring to the end. A lesson I was totally dreading turned into one of the greatest lessons and a moment I will always remember! Her soul is very precious to our Heavenly Father and I can only hope one day I can be as strong as her or have a beautiful soul like hers. Holy cow.

Well I am going to save the other notes for next week haha because I am making this way too long. But read Alma 7! That’s what I studied this week.

My comp is doing great! Haha she is the best. President had interviews with the missionaries this past week and I told him I’d be okay if he kept us companions for the rest of her mission.. He laughed… Buuut I’m serious.. haha! She’s super funny too.. and she LOVES Michael Jackson music. I guess she didn’t know that he was a little cray cray and got upset when a member told her the news that he was a little nuts so we walked and she asked me if He was in Heaven and I told her that yes, he is in Heaven and probably not crazy and learning the Gospel! She hopes he is doing alright.

Found a microphone.. You can guess what happened next..

Rap battle rap battle

Well that explains our week! Oh and I also got beat up by a wall haha.. We were walking and this dog started following us and he looked like the ewok scary teddy bears on Star Wars that give me nightmares so I kept looking back at it saying, “Stop following us!!” Then it started walking faster and so I looked back, then whipped back around to see where I was walking and I wore my hair down for once so of course it got in my face and all of a sudden there was a wall. Proof that wearing your hair up is always the better option. It’s not too bad with makeup covering it… Next time we go to soccer though people may ask how Companionship Inventory went… Haha just kidding.