Monday, April 27, 2015

2 Months down! 5 Aug 2013

Yay!! today marks my 2 month anniversary! wow, I cannot believe that two months have gone by. Seriously. 60 days of missionary work! 

This week has been kind of crazy, every week that goes by I realize more and more how truly hectic and emotionally draining missionary work is. You never know what each week is going to bring, every day is a surprise! 

Monday we got invited to a cookout for some of the widows in the 2 Malta wards. That was SO fun! I have always enjoyed being around elderly people because they have such good stories, but get 20 of them in a room.. Oh boy, it's wild! It was so good to see them smile and have a good time talking about the past, they always recognize the blessings in their lives--no matter how sick they are now. We also had FHE with the Robinson family! We love living with them, they are the sunshine in our mornings. Kent is always cracking "dad" jokes and he can always get me to smile, Naomi is ALWAYS there to encourage me and to support me, she even listens to me when I cry! haha. I love them so much. 

We were so excited for Tuesday to come around. We had 5 appointments with new people and we were eager to teach.... not a single door opened. Ah it was so frustrating! the people out here work so much, it's so hard to catch them. When we make appointments they usually give us the days when they don't have to work, which is good but they like to spend that time in town or with their families, it's always a toss up! We had dinner with a family from the ward and we shared a message with them So at least our whole day didn't go to waste. 

Wednesday we had a little bit of a better day, we had some miles left over for the month so we drove ourselves out to Elba. We were only able to catch 2 families to share messages with, they were active members. We tried to visit a few of the Less Active members from the ward but we still couldn't catch anyone. We did get to meet with the Hansberger family though, they are less active and have had some issues with drugs and smoking but they are working hard on coming back. The mom and dad have been clean for 2 years now and the dad is getting ready to baptize one of the girls. We are teaching the little girl and getting her ready for her baptism that's coming up in a few weeks, they wanted her to have the lessons even though she goes to primary every week. After dinner we had one of the biggest miracles we've seen, we got a call a few weeks ago from Bro. Durfee saying that the mom of one of the sisters in the ward has requested to meet with the missionaries and was wondering if we could meet with her. Of course we said yes and made a plan to meet her. Well we got to on Wednesday, her name is Anita and she is AMAZING. Her best friend died a few months ago and she had seen how her daughter and her son-in-law Rhett had handled the situation really well. The man that died was Rhett's dad and although it hurt Rhett he was able to move forward and continue working on the farm. She wanted to know what was it that gave them the faith to move forward. We taught her a little about the plan of salvation and taught her the restoration, she was so eager to learn more but we told her we couldn't do it all in one night, she had had so many questions and so many comments that we had been there for 2 hours!! The first hour she spent getting to know us and telling us about her life, she is quite the lady! It was a really good lesson, she wanted us back as soon as we could. We have an appointment for this wednesday, we are excited!

Thrusday was kind of the same idea as the first couple days.. no doors opened for us. It was really frustrating but we had a stake wide High Priest dinner that we were invited to by the Stake President. We had a good time getting to know the members in the ward and we even had to speak about our missionary work out here. We had a lot of fun, not to mention the food was to die for. 

Friday we had the chance to talk to Jill, we encouraged her to set a baptismal date since she has stopped smoking for more than 2 weeks now! We are really proud of her and all the hard work she has put in but now she wants to wait until her parents can come from florida for the baptism. She said it might not be until next summer. We will keep trying to work with her, her son was baptized last week and she had a great experience. We hope that this will motivate her to set a date. She invited us to teach the FHE tonight at her place so we are excited to spend some time with her and her kids. 

Saturday we did some service for a few hours... weeding... the worst thing in the world. We aren't talking tiny little garden weeds, we are talking like giant weeds that have roots the size of texas. I think I fell like 4 times trying to pull them out, I would pull with all my might and then POP out it would come and I would go flying... I think Naomi got it on video, so embarrassing. But we had a lot of fun, it's nice to be outside. 

Yesterday was super busy. We had to go up to Albion to teach the Young Women about missionary work. We taught them the Restoration and then sister Zamudio and I acted like investigators, basically one giant role play. It was really fun. The girls begged for more time to prepare and worried about teaching the wrong thing but they did SO well. It was cute to see them so stressed out about teaching two investigators. They had a lot of fun, we hope to have motivated them into serving missions like some of them wanted to. We had to race back to Malta to make it in time for Ward Council. We are really getting the wards motivated about working with us, it has been wonderful to see how much support they are willing to give. We are doing really well at always having a member present in our lessons with investigators, that really helps us. We also had to teach a lesson in Relief Society! That was a lot of fun. I see that Sister Israelson sent you our picture, I'm happy she liked our lesson. We taught about the importance of Visiting Teaching and how we need them to be consistent at it since a lot of the less actives we visit will come from the sisters saying that those members are ready to have the missionaries over. We got the sisters excited to serve and we hope that it will go well. We also handed out and explained the 21-day member missionary program, they are so excited to help us out with that. We had dinner with the Hall family, oh my heavens their kids are SO cute! I am really hating this missionary rule about not playing with kids, it seriously breaks my heart. After the dinner we had a little scripture game and the little boys were so excited they were jumping off the couch--literally. The one little boy, Zeb, jumped and said "catch me!" and of course I COULDN'T so he fell pretty hard on the ground. I felt HORRIBLE. It took him like two seconds to realize what happened and then he just looked at me all confused. Poor kid, I think he lost trust in the missionaries. Lili and Ella were so cute too, they chased us around with the balloons and Jessie was the oldest (9) and was too cool to run around but they all participated in the game. We visited Sister Sundberg after dinner, she has been having a hard time since her daughter passed away. She is a widow and her daughter had moved in to help her out since she is older but she passed away from illness. We talked for a while and could see how hard of a time she's been having, we shared a message with her, the spirit was so strong it had all of us crying. We are really getting to know the people out here, we are loving that. 

Anyway, that's a little about my week. We had Zone meeting on Friday and we learned that the next transfers will be on the 19th of this month. I'm not quite sure if i'll stay or if I'll go so I will let you know what happens in a couple weeks. If I leave I will get to start a new area with a new companion, if I stay then I think I will be put into a trio with another new missionary. We will see what happens!! 

I hope you guys are having a wonderful week, "there are bumps in the road but nothing frustrates the work!"

Hermana Calero

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