Hola Familia :)
First off, Happy Halloween :) hope you all ate a lot of candy for me. Haha Halloween here doesn't really exist so it was just a normal day here!
Hermana Holmes her companion says "Happy Halloween! Fun fact: nobody celebrates it here. Some little kids asked Hermana Peters and I if it's true that the children go from house to house asking for candy. They made it sound like it was some fairytale story. It was so cute!"
Back to Hermana Peters -
My week was great, different but great. We received a message Wednesday night saying that we needed to be in the church at 11:30 the next day for a meeting with the Zone Leaders. So the next day we went and the Zone Leaders told us that for the next little bit we will be doing things a little bit different. Here in Guanacaste (a province, kinda like a state) we are pushing sooo hard for a stake, and the only thing we need now is for our little branch here to become a ward. There is a bunch of things that you need to become a ward, but the most important thing is attendance and priesthood holders. the way the determine if you can become a ward is they take the total number of members and then its some kind of proportion of that for how many priesthood holders you need and attendance at church. So we have about 600+ ¨members¨ in our ward, on our ward directory thing, and have about 100 in church every week. so in order to get this stake and ward, our job for the next 2 weeks or so is from 1 to 4 everyday we work on the Simi (i don't know what that translates to in English.. haha but its just like a ward directory. We have to go through and find who is active, who is inactive, who died, moved, things like that and clean out as many people as we can. So now everyday from 1 to 4 all of us missionaries here in Santa Cruz meet at the church and go through the simi. The past few days we just went through, finding the people we knew, and a couple times we had some members there helping. This week we will start going out and looking for people, and trying to clean out our simi so we can get this ward. Our goal is to have a stake here by January, and to do that we need everything to be ready the end of this month.
On top of that we are pushing to get 20 baptisms in my district this month. That is about 5 every companionship... And at first i felt pretty good because we had like 14 people with baptismal dates. But slowly all of them are falling because no one is coming to church... And now we are losing 3 hours of working time... Plus we are getting to the point where we might need to drop investigators who aren't progressing. This kills me because the love i have for my investigators is a love i cant describe. I want to best for all of them, and so obviously i want them to be coming to church, and praying and stuff.
Last night as i was thinking about all of this, feeling a little down about the day since we didn't have investigators at church all i wanted to do was to talk to you guys. Talk to my family about what was going on, and get some advice. But i knew i couldn't and in that moment, i realized that there was someone even greater waiting for me to talk to Him. So as i was saying my prayers that night i went into a different room, and poured out my heart to my Father in Heaven. I told him everything i was feeling. All my fears, all my doubts, and my worries, and how i felt so weak. I want to be the best missionary, but sometimes feel like my weaknesses are more than my strengths, and that i don't have enough power to do what im supposed to. As i expressed all these feelings, and then i just sat there. In that moment, i was overcome with a peace in my heart. I know that i was called here to Costa Rica for not only the good parts of Rachel, but also all of my weaknesses and shortcomings. My Heavenly Father knows me perfectly, and has a plan for me, and maybe his plan is different than what i want. And i know that i need to trust in Him. I know that i am supposed to be here in Costa Rica, at this moment of my life. I know that i got called here because there are certain people i need to help, and that my Heavenly Father has it all planned out, and that he will make this happen like they are suppose to, but sometimes it takes a TON of faith to trust. Actually, all the time. I feel like every single footstep i take here takes faith. I need faith to know where to go to find those people, to know what to teach them, and to know how to help them come unto Christ. But i also know with my Heavenly Father, and Jesus Christ, ALL things are possible.
I already told mom this but here is the house update... We had everything ready to go to move into an apartment last Friday. It was this really really nice apartment for here, with HOT water and everything. The lady that was going to rent it to us and needed us to sign a contract. We needed the branch president here to do that because she needed a name and we dont know when one of us will leave and such. So the night before we were going to move, our president went to sign this contract and after he told us that this lady was going to make us pay more than we had to and that we were going to have light or electricity for a week and all the stuff. So he said it would be better to find a different house. We all felt that this was what we needed to do also. So once again we are house hunting.... Not fun.. but hopefully we will be able to find something soon.
Oh and also i forgot to say that we had transfers last week.. haha obviously I'm still here in Santa Cruz. Haha but one of the sisters got transferred..:( so we have a new sister and she is great! We will be having transfers again in about 3 weeks.. ya its a little different because of Christmas and i guess it is really expensive to have people fly home around Christmas, so we have a transfer in 3 weeks and then don't have another one for 8 weeks! So if me and Hermana Holmes make it through this next one, we will be together for Christmas and my birthday!! Pray for this :) haha
Well I'm about out of time.. but know that i love you all:) thank you for the prayers and love. I hope you know that it really does help. I hope everyone has a wonderful week and remember that I'm praying for you guys too!
Con mucho amor,
Hermana Peters
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