Hermana Medeiros Texas Houston Mission: Week 28

In the morning I get up at 620 and will read or write in my journal until my comp gets out of bed about 5 or 10 minutes later. Then we go running/walking and then when we come back we start getting ready and have breakfast and do personal study, comp study, once in a while we have time for language study and then we usually leave around 11 and we just start visiting people and contacting. Sometimes we go to the library and we will do an hour or so of family history/mormon message time and we can watch church videos and we just spend all day out of our apartment unless we have to go back to get something but for the more part we don't come back to our apartment until after 9.

When you first got to Houston you told me something like you’re supposed to contact like 30 people a day, is that right? Do you usually get that many? So they changed it about my second transfer. They lowered it to 15. It's been really hard to get 15 because sometimes we are out all day and seeing people but we don't see people that we can invite to learn more or invite to English class. The contacting is also called invitations to learn and so if we don't invite them we don't count them.

How do you go about contacting and finding people? Right now we are going through a lot of former from our area book and re contacting people that used to be investigators but for some reason or another stopped taking the lessons. Sometimes we just go knocking on houses and hope a Hispanic answers...White people are scary haha (I haven't met a lot of rude people but of the ones I have they are all white! The Hispanics will at least talk with us for a few minutes but the white people basically tell us to get off their porch and not to come back haha not all of the white people are scary.) It's just funny I get so ready to talk in Spanish and then a white person answers and I can't talk haha.

How’s the Oakcrest ward? Are you feeling more comfortable and accepted by the members? It's pretty good I know it will keep getting better with time and that I will become friends with these members like I did in the woodlands. They are all super nice and loving and I love them all I just can't wait till I actually feel close to some of them like the way I did in the woodlands.

How’s the Spanish coming? It's pretty good... I mean we got told this week (twice!!!) That our Spanish sucked but we got told that our accent is good, haha it was really funny. I think my Spanish is good I feel it gets better every week at least a little bit.

On Friday Tate kept asking me for a banana milkshake. I thought that was super cute---where did he come up with that? So I took him to the store and we bought the ingredients to make milkshakes. He agreed that a strawberry/banana one sounded better. The whole time at Costco he was singing ‘follow the prophet, follow the prophet, follow the prophet, don’t go astray.” Over and over. It was really cute. One of the sample guys even started singing with him.

That is so cute!!!! Taters is the sweetest in the world!! I can imagine his cute voice asking for a milkshake and singing the song in Costco.

So six months into your mission, in what ways have you grown or changed? I have grown and changed in so many ways. I can see how different I am from when I first came out. Sometimes I feel like a different person. I mean who would have ever thought I could go knock on someone's door or go up to a stranger in the store and have a conversation with them haha I mean come on this is me we are talking about! I've just grown so much and I've learned so much too. I've done a lot of things that I never thought in a million years I would do. I've been facing my fears and trying to take a stand in my life.

What is your favorite part of missionary work? Meeting new people :) it's always so much fun to go and try to meet new people every day. Just talk to everyone. I still don't really like starting the conversation but when we can get into a house and just talk with them and get to know them that's when it's really great. Just sharing simple messages and knowing that I'm doing something good is really great.

What is the most challenging part? trying to accept that everyone has their free agency!!! I just want someone to progress so that they can see what we are giving them! I mean yeah I want people to get baptized but really I just want someone to really see what we are giving them and how it can bless their lives. When people tell us they aren't reading and they don't come to church, I just think "man this sucks" but I have to remember that everything will happen in God's timing and that's what I'm trying to rely on because he knows what these people need, I don't. You can't force people to do things they don't want to do. You just have to love them and be there for them.

Yesterday in our gospel priciples class we learned about the creation and it was really good I learned so much that I didn't think that I could learn about the creation. We learned that it's a process and how we can relate it into our lives. Everything in the creation happened in order. God didn't just randomly do something one day, it was a process and then it turned into what we have today. We can apply that to our lives by thinking there is a reason for everything that happens. Nothing is just random or thrown at us for no reason. Everything ahs a reason and it is all guiding us to become who we can be.

So you remember the old man I talked about last week? with the wife who is in a coma? his wife died on Tuesday...it was so sad we went and visited him on wednesday and we were there for almost two hours and it was the saddest thing but it was also the sweetest. The funeral was on friday and we really felt that we should be there but we had zone meeting...but we decided to go to the funeral because he asked us to come and we felt that we should be there for him. We helped out with the lunch in and he was so happy that we had come. on sunday lots of people thanked us for helping out an for coming.

We hopefully will start teaching 2 part member families this week who all have kids too. They were all former investigators and we don't know why the missionaries stopped visiting them. But we met them this week and have return appointments!

Hermana Provost and Mccomber called us last night and told us that we are getting 2 free baptisms. There is a family who live on the border of our area and there's and they have been teaching them all the lessons and these investigators hate the louetta ward and they've come to our ward a few times and they love it and so they are going to be coming to our ward. So that will be fun to have new people in our ward!

So, remember how I told you that Hermana Carbajal called me and said that Hugo had gone to church last week?

She had a really good talk with him and he is almost done with the book of Mormon!!!! AHHHH!!!! and he's having a hard time, she talked to him about fasting to open edilmas heart so that she will marry him and allow him to do this. he asked if he could be baptized if his wife isn't and she told him yes. and so they talked about that and then they found an elder and he gave hugo a blessing and it told him how he is going to be blessed and he is going to help edilma and it was just really good, she told me he was crying and she was crying. he wants to be baptized so bad!! We are just hoping edilma will open her heart and stuff because hugo is sooooo ready!

A less active took us to a Chinese restaurant this week and i tried oyster :P NASTY!!!! haha but i tried it. And then she kept telling us to go back and get more and more dessert and wouldn't let us say no! (it was a buffet) so i had 2 things of ice cream and a thing of pudding and then thankfully she didn't tell me to go get more haha!

This week was really good! I'm excited for another week! I love it here in oakcrest so much!!!