Attitude is Everything!

So first off a little about Texas. Navigating is hard! It’s all flat so I can’t use mountains to get my direction straight. It’s not too hot but it’s soooo humid! And the mosquitos are ridiculous! I had a massive circle of bites on my calf and on one arm I counted 19 bites in one day! They are from the devil I know it!

The people here are super, super nice! They feed us every night and the first three days here I ate double dinners and could barely handle it! Since I can barely speak to some of them, they are so kind with being patient and letting me mess up a ton. Like trying to say my sister is speaking Mongolian and ending up saying she has a mental handicap or saying shoulders instead of men, but hey it’s all in the process. ;)

Sundays are the best thing ever! We get to go to church, take the santa cena, ayunar, and see the branch members. We meet in a super small building that is in the downtown type area. I think it used to be a lawyers office, but it’s been fixed up for church. Crazy-ish story … some people we talk to don't like us and one guy saw us, opens the door to let his pit bull out and closes it while his CRAZY dog is trying to bite us, lol like an attack dog is going to stop me. ;) Our mission president is the bomb.com!! He might be the most inspired man I've ever met. Our zone is super tight too and the district as well. We like to meet up a couple times a week in the mornings at 5:50 and play ultimate frisbee until 7. It’s the best thing ever, especially when we do it in the mud!

Spiritual experience/thought this week:  So when I got here we had two people on date for baptism and now neither one is being taught. So we focused a lot on finding new people to teach and right now the member missionary effort needs help, so we are working hard on that as well. But that left us having to find people by door contacting and referrals. We found a ton of people and I was super excited because when this happened it was all really early on in the week and I thought we'd be able to help people out for sure. However, when we came back to most of these lessons we got stood up by one person after another - it was awesome. ;) But this led us to find people who wouldn't have been home or found without our appointments falling through and it led to us being able to find lots of new people.

Lessons I learned this week: Sometimes we can get discouraged because our plan doesn't turn out. On the mission this happens a lot! But what we don't see, that the Lord does, is that perspective. School might be hard, the team might not be coming together, work could have orders backing up all over the place and it can seem like a disaster, but when this happens it’s an opportunity for blessings. We can show our hope and exercise faith in the Lord and receive many blessings we could never think of, if we just trust in the Lord. He did not send us here to fail He wants us to succeed, we just need to trust in Him, pray and act!

I love you all and God loves you too. Be a champ, see ya next week!

Texas famous fast food!