This has been the most wonderful week! It has been a very hard week for me but also a week of blessings. Sister Altea and I are complete opposites. However, I am beginning to see how her strengths are some of my weaknesses and my strengths are some of her weaknesses. We balance each other out well. But Satan is trying his best to weasel his way into our companionship and one day this week he succeeded. I made a comment without thinking about how it would make Sister Altea feel and she didn't understand what I meant and anyways, that put some stress on our companionship. I am feeling very inadequate in this new calling as a Sister Training Leader and especially because I find myself comparing myself to Sister Altea. She is so hard working. She is really serving the Lord with all her heart, might, mind, and strength. And sometimes...I just get tired. Sometimes I feel like "Can't we just take a break? Can't we just take a second and have some fun?" But Sister Altea is go-go-go! At the end of the day we were able to talk things out and understand where each other was coming from. And what I learned is that I am very makasarili. Selfish. That day that we just happened to have a discord in our companionship was also Sister Altea's dad's birthday and just a few days's after the one year mark of his death. That day was really difficult for me but not for the same reasons it was difficult for Sister Altea. I've been studying Alma Chapter 5 for the past couple of days and it has been very timely. Alma asks, "Are ye stripped of pride?" Um....no. Sister Larson still has a heavty amount of that. And then Alma follows up with the bold statement that "if ye are not (stripped of pride) ye are not prepared to meet God." Yikes. So needless to say, that is what Sister Larson is focusing on right now. I know that pride is one of Satan's favorite tools and that if we do not have open communication in our companionships he will succeed in slowing down the work of the Lord. He cannot stop it from rolling forth, "no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing", but he sure is trying his hardest to slow it down.
But like I said it was also a week of blessings. One of the young men in our ward who is preparing for his mission brought one of the investigators that we had taught earlier this week, to church with him. I had joked about him going to pick up this investigator, but we hadn't seriously asked him to. It was sure a great example of members being missionaries. That same young man bore a very powerful testimony. He opened up about some of the struggles his family was facing at the moment. Sometimes they don't have money to buy food. And yet they find a way to help us with missionary work almost every day. They are the strongest family involved in missionary work and yet they are stuggling so much. Sister Altea and I had been looking for someone deserving that we could ask to do our laundry. After that young man's testimony we just looked at each other and both felt that we had to find someway to help them. So his mom is our new laundry nanay! Also the father of one of the part member families that we are working with right now refuses to pray. But when we were on exchanges he finally prayed!!! Well he just repeated the prayer that his daughter prayed, but still it was great progress. And he also came to church! This area is on fire because of the member-missionary work and Sister Altea and I are just trying to do our best to keep it going.
I wish I could tell you ALL of the miracles and trials and just everything but alas...there's only so much time. Just know that I LOVE BEING A MISSIONARY. And I LOVE YOU!!!!
Sister Larson
a beautiful sunset in the bukid.!
the chubbiest little filipino girl in the world
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