Well.... this week was another one of "THOSE"
weeks to say the least haha...
But really. I really do think that the Lord is teaching
me to play my own game and by my own rules. I've always been so competitive
against other people, and also against myself, that it's been hard to win
against an unbeatable opponent. This week, I've been working on fixing that,
and turning that into something good. I'm learning just to do my very best, and
then leave the rest to the Lord-and He's definitely been allowing me to
practice that this week.
Elder Fetzer and I have been really good at talking to
just about Everybody. We even talked to as many people as we could while we
were on trams(which is notorious for being most missionaries' least favorite
thing about missionary work in poland)... and absolutely nothing haha. We
didn't teach a single other lesson this week, and we spent hour after hour just
searching for people to teach. The interesting part is, I don't feel bad about
it. Sure, our numbers were literally the worst in the mission, but every single
day I felt the Spirit so strongly, and when we finished the day and got inside
for nightly planning, we felt the Spirit's approval on the dat-that we did what
we needed to. It's been interesting to change my thinking about what's going
on, and what I can do. I listened to a talk by Elder Bednar, and in it, he says
something along the lines of: "happiness isn't the absence of adversity.
But we must learn to find happiness even amongst our trials. A load is a
necessary part of our mortality." I've been thinking about that concept a
lot, and combined it with Elder Scott's talk "Finding the Joy in
Life", about how happiness is not some far-away point that we will one day
reach if we keep pushing forward.
It is available now. So this week, we tried to be
happy-even when nobody talked to us, and when we felt sometimes like we were
wasting our time. The Lord also allowed me to see how much I've grown over the
past year and a half. He gave me some experiences that would have destroyed me
some time ago, but that I was able to look at, appreciate them for what they
were, and even laugh a little.
One of those experiences happened yesterday. I can't say
much about what happened at church, but a lot of drama went down, and there was
some confusion, and hurt feelings, and a whole bunch of stuff... BUT, we moved
past that, and kept on going. We had gotten a call from the sisters(the sisters
in our district are the bomb. They're such good missionaries, and they work
really hard. It's awesome to serve with them.), and they had set up a meeting
with a guy who had a baptismal date a few transfers ago. He had set up a
meeting at his house in Wawer(an hour and a half east of our house, across the
Wisła river). We felt good about it, so we got on a bus Sunday
afternoon, and headed over there. I tried to call a few times that day to make
sure he was still okay to meet, and got no answer, so we went anyways. We get
all the way out into this ghetto suburb of Warsaw, onto this forsaken street
that could have been the setting for a horror film, and are just about to his
house, when he called us back. We were literally standing up on the bus waiting
to get off at his stop, and we picked up the phone. I told him who we were, and
that we were set up to meet with him right then, and that we were really close.
He muttered under his breath and hung up. But, we weren't having that, so we
went to go knock on his door. Turns out that the address he gave us was to this
abandoned house that was all boarded up-nobody had lived there for a while. We
just laughed. So, remembering all of those stories about people who were led
somewhere, and it didn't work out, so they talked to the people around the house,
and somebody let them in and was later baptized and all that jazz... so we
started talking to everybody.Nobody wanted anything. We started tracting a little bit,
and we met this guy who was a complete jerk, and just out to make us mad. It was so unsuccessful that we just looked at
each other, and I busted up laughing. It was straight-up ridiculous. The good
thing was, though, I wasn't mad. I could handle those kinds of things now. We
had prayed, we had prepared for the meeting, we had tried our very best, and
nothing happened. That was it-we had done what the Lord wanted us to do, and we
made it back home just in time for a late dinner and a tiny bit of studying.
The Lord has been stretching and pulling us these past few weeks, and trying
our faith to see if we were going to give up. It's been really, really tough,
but we're going to prove faithful.
Interestingly enough, the same thing happened a few other
times this week, and Elder Fetzer and I would find ourselves sitting on a
random park bench in a gray part of town, and not talking... just taking a
minute or two to gather our thoughts and our faith. The Lord would always
answer our prayers with something just ridiculously funny when we were at our
lowest points, and we would just laugh it off, and be able to get the things
done that we needed to. All in all, this week was one of the toughest weeks
I've had on my mission, but I've learned so much, and I'm stronger because of
it.
We're meeting with our new missionary coordinator on
Thursday to discuss a plan for finding less-actives... so hopefully that should
start this week. We are excited to get on that!
Well that's that. That was our week! Hopefully this week will be just as
fun and just as successful! Love you guys!~
