WEEK 51: "Service Days Are The Best Days"
Hola!!
Well this week has been amazing! One of the highlights is that I can finally see a sunset now. I like to refer to my last area as the armpit of the mission because there is nothing growing and it is such a dirty city. There are zero flower, no cocos, trash piles everywhere haha and you can't see any sunsets. The ward and the members were incredible but the views were a bit of a trial. However, now in my new area of Hialeah I CAN FINALLY SEE A SUNSET. It's weird to realize what you don't have until you change your perspective. I love it here.
During my whole mission I have been praying super hard to be able to find and teach families. However, it has been very very very hard to find families to teach..until I showed up here! Now it feels like the only people we are working with are families. I am so grateful for the divine plan that God has created for our families. There is no better place in the world where we can learn and grow and become like Him than in the home.
One of our favorite families that we are working with is a part member family. Kevin is the only person in his family who is not a member. He is 10 years old and reminds me exactly of Noah haha. He is even entering into the spelling bee like Noah. He is fulll of thought provoking questions and has the biggest smile ever.This week we taught him about prophets and he even asked us how we truly know if a person is called of God to be a prophet. He is a thinker. Kevin is dying to get baptized and he knows the importance of following the example of Jesus Christ. His sister Kelly is a junior and one day she sat in on one of our lessons. After a video we shared she started bawling and she told us that she wants to start coming back to church. The spirit truly is our teacher and our guide in this life. She told us she hadn't felt the spirit in a very long time and was seeking to feel more of that heavenly light.
We did some really cool service this week!! We helped one of our friends attempt to clean up his wife's hording mess... it was interesting. I don't even think we made a dent. And we also helped our lovely relief society president pack up her stuff to get ready to move. I love serving because it truly helps me remember what Christ did. He was always in the dirtiest parts of town, with the outcast sinners, with the diseased, and with the poor. As we got super dirty this week and lost ourselves in service, I was reminded of who My Savior truly is.
This past week I went on exchanges with Sister Remund!!! It was an incredible day filled with lots and lots of miracles. She is such a power house. We had a very crazy schedule with five scheduled lessons back to back. We were excited. We used our time very carefully and did some planning in the morning so we would be able to get in all of our testifying contacts and all of our studies. As we started our day with a prayer I pleaded with the Lord that we would be about to set a baptismal date that day and have His power to be with us as we acted and did our part. In the afternoon we visited a cute family of five that we are working with, and their father was in the hospital. The mother let us in to share a comforting scripture. As we turned to Mosiah 24 we described the importance of how these people had made a sacred convent with God through baptism and later they were lead out of captivity because of their faith and patience. In that exact moment the spirit prompted us to invite the mom and her daughter to be baptized and they accepted. It was a shear miracle and I know that God truly does answers our prayers as we pray in faith and do our part.
As I look back on the best year of my life and I am eternally grateful for the Grace of my Savior. When we turn our wills, desires, hopes, dreams, and plans over to Him, He truly liberates us. He sets us free from doubt, sin, banished dreams, and lost causes. Through Him there is perfect hope and there is nothing that is impossible when we work together in the cause of Christ. I love John 10:10 that says, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."
As we walk where He walked, as we serve where He served, we will find who He truly is. As we focus our lives on the gospel of Jesus Christ we will find who we truly are as sons and daughters of A heavenly King and We will want to act differently because we know what our divine potential is. We will be filled with a Peace that we cannot find anywhere else in the World. I know that My Savior Lives and that He is the Prince of Peace.
LOVE YOU ALL! Hope you all are doing well.
xo,
Hermana Richards
