December 23, 2013
¡Hola familia y amigos!
I hope you are all excited for Christmas!!! I am pretty dang excited myself because I get to talk to the best family in the world :)
All right, time to tell you all about the hardest week of my mission so far. And I´m not exaggerating either, this one was literally the hardest. Had I written this email on Saturday night, you all would have worried about me. I was even scared by my own feelings because I had never felt so depressed in my entire life. But gratefully I´m writing today and can explain how everything turned out!
So, finding week. Mission goal was to find 800 new investigators this week. That means 8 for every companionship. Tough goal, but definitely doable. Hna Thompson and I had had a couple weeks of not a lot of lessons or any new investigators, so we were definitely needing some miracles. At the beginning of the week it wasn´t so bad. We got a few good contacts from knocking doors and in the street. We had citas set up and we were actually confident that we would be able to help the mission goal. We were contacting more than we ever had before, so naturally we thought that by working harder and talking to more people, we would be blessed with more people to teach. But...we were wrong. Every single cita we set up fell through. Every single one. Even other citas that normally don´t fail (with recent converts and members) were falling through. Most of the people just weren´t home at the time of the cita, but a couple people actually lied about their address so we tried to find a place that didn´t exist. We literally spent hours walking the streets. Our shoulders hurt, our feet hurt, and we were just plain discouraged. And it wouldn´t have been so bad, except for it´s finding week! So every night we had to report to our leaders that we had 0 news that day. And everyone else was seeing tons of people and finding plenty of investigators so they kept asking what we were doing wrong and how they could help and we had to tell them that people literally just kept failing us and there wasn´t anything we could do about it. And the later it got it the week, the worse everything seemed. The APs even asked our District Leader to work in our area on Saturday afternoon. Then on Saturday evening was the ward Christmas dinner and none of the people we invited came and the dinner started so late (an hour late) that we couldn´t even stay the whole time even though I was supposed to play piano for some musical program stuff. Hna Thompson and I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday morning trying not to cry.
The good news is that the story doesn´t end there. But I wanted to tell you all a little about discouragement and hope. Everybody knows missions are hard and everybody knows that missionaries get rejected a lot. But before the mission it is really hard to truly understand how it feels. I always thought that even if nobody listened to you it would still be easy to stay happy all the time because missionaries know they are doing the work of the Lord and that numbers don´t matter. But that´s NOT true. We do the same thing day after day without any breaks (besides Pday kind of). There are always people checking your numbers and asking what you can do better. It is so hard to stay motivated when people lie to you or literally shut a door in your face and you just cannot do anything to force yourself to talk to the next person because it´s easier to just keep walking. You feel like you´re wasting your time. You feel like you´re wasting the Lord´s time. You never, ever feel adequate enough. It always seems like the other missionaries are doing better or getting better investigators or have the cool stories. Everyone says not to compare yourself to others but during finding week everyone keeps asking everyone else how many new investigators they have and we kept having to say 0. But I now understand better than ever what Elder Holland was talking about in his talk about depression from last General Conference. It is real and it is scary. Sometimes people too often think that people who are depressed just need to shake it off and think positively, but it´s so much harder than that. I´m lucky enough to not be someone who has problems with depression, and I know that a lot of people are in much more horrible situations than I was last week, but it was very mind-opening to have a taste of the worst discouragement of my life because I know I´m going to have a lot more compassion for those people now.
But when we have hope, God gives us miracles :) The APs were worried about us so they had our Sister Training Leader Hna Ramsay come work with us Sunday night, the very last night of finding week. We had 2 citas with ¨futures¨ set up. They both ended up falling through. But Hna Ramsay was just what we needed in terms of energy and cheerfulness and motivation because her boldness ended up getting us in someone´s door on the very first time we met them and we talked for a long time to this woman named Maria and she became a new investigator. So sometimes on Saturday night you don´t feel like God is even hearing your prayers, but the answer to your prayers can come by way of someone else. Believe me, the answers ALWAYS come. Even if it´s in the last couple hours before finding week is over. I learned a lot this week. But the most important thing is to have hope. My favorite quote from Elder Holland´s talk was ¨If the bitter cup does not pass, drink it and be strong.¨ (What´s weird is that I write quotes for every day in my agenda and that quote was written for Saturday night, the night we were the most discouraged, and I had written that quote for that day weeks ago. The quotes I write in for everyday sometimes literally seem to predict the future, it´s happened before. Now I´m nervous to write really comforting quotes in for the weeks to come! haha)
So, especially because it´s Christmas, remember where the source of our hope comes from: Jesus Christ. Remember His birth and what it means to you. Remember that this Great God who works incredible miracles and created the universes knows your name. Isaiah 9:6.
Merry Christmas!!!!! I love you all!
Hna Andrew
P.S. Guess what tomorrow is! My 5 month mark!!!
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