Week of March 21, 2016...Turning the Corner

Well hello...this week definitely happened! I definitely learned a lot this week and made some progress on my goals and the things I'm working on. We had a packed week this week. I've been really good about filling our schedule with productive things and events. It helps with my attitude and the PTSD symptoms if I give myself something to focus on and complete, rather than just roaming the streets of Poland trying to talk to people. It's been helping a ton! 

We had another one of those 'testing weeks' where everything just fell through. All of the meetings we set up, even the ones with the members, didn't happen and were forgotten about and so on. So that was hard. It really helped me, though, to realize that I really didn't actually care that much haha.

I did what I needed to do, and it didn't work out, but we had done what the Lord needed us to do! We have been learning to laugh a lot when things don't go our way, and do our best to "find joy in the journey". We've come a really long way! I've seen a huge change in the way I react to persecution/mean and grumpy people/let-downs. In fact, I tried talking to this older gentleman on the tram on my way to email this morning, and he was not having it at all. I asked him how he was doing, and he asked me why? and then told me it wasn't necessary for me to know, and stopped talking to me. A few weeks ago, I would have probably gotten frustrated at how hardened Polish people are, but instead I just felt bad for the poor guy. It takes a lot to move a person so far away from human interaction that they don't trust the intentions of someone asking them about their own life. Anyways-I'm learning to love the Polish people more and more. It's been a long journey, but I feel like I've turned a corner.

This week was really good, because I realized a few things that have been helping me a lot. Like I said: I feel like I've finally turned that corner. I've accepted in my heart(finally... Yes, I know I'm stubborn). That I actually want to be here and that I'm going to do whatever I need to in order to love my mission and love these people.  I've been learning to control my mind. People say all the time that 'attitude is everything'. Well I realized that our attitude is fully dependent on our thoughts. Good thoughts come from God and His Spirit, and bad thoughts are attempts to bring us down, and are not from God.

I've been working on training my mind to keep the good thoughts, and dismiss the bad ones as quickly as possible. I've even been doing it with my pain, and just literally telling myself in my head that it doesn't hurt as bad as it feels, and that I'm not really hurt, and that everything is going to be great... and just look at that-my pain has been doing SO much better. It's ridiculous how much power our minds have and what we can train them to do. The Lord has been giving me opportunities to practice training my mind by giving me sucky situations to deal with hahaha... but it's been going well, and I can say that I've enjoyed my mission so much more this week than I ever have the past 3 months. It's going to be good. Not only am I going to survive Poland, but I'm going to end up loving it.

The church is true! The Atonement is real! I sure love you guys. Make it the best week ever.

March 7th, 2016.....

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!~

March 3rd...Quick Update & JEREMY GOT HIS MISSION CALL!!

Hey fam, 

Health update: So I just got off of a Skype call with the doctor, and everything is going great! I'm feeling a lot better, and I have a ton less pain, and I'm hanging in there! Things are all going to work out. Every day is a struggle, but every day I'm doing what I need to, and am finding my own success. 

Elder Fetzer and I are having one of those "faith-trying" starts to our transfer... we're talking to everybody and just yesterday we FINALLY got somebody to acknowledge that we existed lol. It was pretty awesome. Didn't quite teach a lesson, but we're doing what we can. Even so, I have the Spirit with me every day, and I get to the end of the day and know that I did what Heavenly Father asked me to do. I think I've finally realized that I'm running my own race and just have to do what I need to in order to be obedient and do what I need to do, instead of measuring my success based on everybody else. It's been another humbling, but very constructive experience for me. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on how far I've come and how much I've learned through all my trials this past year and a half, and I'm super grateful for all of the progress that has been made. I wouldn't have made it with out all of you, and my Savior.

So thank you! There have been so many miracles this week that I can try and talk about during my weekly email, but I just wanted to update y'all on where I'm at! I love y'all!

ps: I SAW THE EMAIL HEADING BAR FROM JEREMY THAT HE'S GOING TO PERU!!!! THAT'S MY BOY! CONGRATS BUDDY LOVE YOU!

pps: I've been thinking a lot about Grammy and Ellie with their surgeries and also about my boy Scott.  I sure love you guys!!