Last Missionary Moments of November

Hello to all!

Here are this weeks moments: 

Playing Piano: Up until I served in Laredo, I didn't make too much use of my piano playing abilities. Last transfer there was another Sister Missionary who played quite well, also, so I didn't do much then, either. However, this transfer the amounts of piano playing occasions has multiplied exponentially. I started off the transfer strong by playing for the choir for District Conference - with about 2 days of practice. That was pretty miraculous. Then I got asked to help with the primary program in the Spanish Branch. 

Side note: the musical abilities of the Hispanic culture do not generally expand to the arena of singing. Especially in young children. So that's pretty funny. 

Anyway, yesterday was the most I've experienced so far: I played for 2 sacrament meetings, 1.5 primary practices, 2 baptisms, and one district meeting. Thank you, Mom and Brooke. Thanks to you, Laredo has music. :)

Nothingness of Man: This transfer we've had a lot of miracles, and I always just end up feeling so very aware of God's mercy. Sister Medina and I memorized Mosiah 4:11 this week, and that and the hymn "I Stand All Amazed" pretty much sum up my feelings from this transfer. God is SO GOOD. I don't get it. He just keeps blessing us, even though we're less obedient than dirt (says the Book of Mormon). It's really humbling and amazing. 

Thanksgiving: I have heard of horror stories about thanksgiving for my whole mission (having 5+ meal appointments and throwing up between them to be able to eat more, etc), so I have been preparing myself against this moment since February. We decided to only have 1 meal appointment. and it worked! We had a zone meeting, which included a thanksgiving dinner by one of the branches, and then our car had a flat tire, so the Zone Leaders taught us how to fix it, and then by that time we only had a couple of hours so we did some contacting and talked to a couple members and then went to our meal appointment and left feeling quite content at only having eaten 2 turkey dinners. :) However, we definitely felt the Turkey Come the next morning, getting up was pretty painful... 

Well, I hope you enjoyed this week's missionary moments! I love you all!

Love, 

--

Hermana Reynolds

More Missionary Moments

Here are this week's missionary moments:

The Conch: Every Saturday, the North and South Laredo Zones get together in an epic battle of soccer. We play at a place called "the conch" (it's just a rink such as would be used for hockey, but without ice.) We get up at 5 so that we can be there by 5:30, and usually there are so many missionaries that we split up into 3 teams and rotate. It's usually pretty dark and we're playing on cement, so it's a very interesting experience! Sports were terrifying before the mission, but now they're very enjoyable. It's a fun way to interact as missionaries. 

OYMing: (OYM = Open Your Mouth). In some proselyting areas, a lot of the work is done through members and most converts are found that way. In Laredo, it's usually more effective to find investigators through contacting and OYMing. That just consists of talking to whoever is on the street. There's always a little natural hesitation when approaching people who are about to leave or are playing basketball in the street, etc, but ultimately, really cool experiences from it and God blesses with miracles when you show your diligence in talking with everyone. While we were in McAllen this week, my temporary companion and I went to a park to find there, and we ended up meeting a woman who had a lot of questions about church and baptism and we were able to sit down with her and teach her a really beautiful lesson. Miracles like that happen every. single. day. It's so cool

Sad Sundays: This moment is so frustrating. You go by investigators who have said they're going to come to church, and then they say something like "you know what, we just don't think this church is for us," and they haven't even tried it out! it's ridiculous. Yesterday we had one person say he didn't want to come and we flat out said "so you're not going to follow God today?" and he said "no, I don't need anymore blessings, I'm not going to lose anything by not going. It's really horrible. Something I've learned on my mission is that I'm never going to miss church again. It's so important!

Well, I hope your week goes marvelously :)

Love you all!

--

Hermana Reynolds

Missionary Moments

Hola a todos!

The last few weeks I've been feeling less than motivated to write stories of my mission, because every day is basically full of miracles and after a while they all just run into each other. Great problem to have, right? Anyway, I'm going to try a little experiment, and start writing about moments of the mission instead, so that you can get a glimpse into the small moments that are talked about with less frecuency. 

Missionary Moment #1: Biking. (backgroud information, we have a mission rule that we use our bikes 2x every week). On Thursday we decided to bike, and so we layered our sweaters and got on our bikes and headed out to work. To reach certain parts of our area we have to cross and bike on the side of a highway. It's very exciting. We reached the part where we had to cross, and an accident had just barely cleared away so there was a surge of traffic. But then the police man stopped traffic for us to cross. We bike and bike, and then we reach a really big hill. And you bike, until you can't bike any more. and then you walk. And then you bike again. But the best part is that you feel really happy and not discouraged or mad. Just happy that you get to teach people :)

Missionary Moment #2: Frozen Yogurt. Some days you need a pick me up, so you take a 15 minute break and go to the Fro Yo store and eat Taro Frozen Yogurt, and watch the stray dog outside trying to find its owner.

Missionary Moment #3: Baptism MIracles. Sometimes you try really hard to help people be baptized and nothing comes of it. And then sometimes you find people that other missionaries have tried to help for a year to be baptized, and then everything falls into place and they decide they want to get baptized. And it's incredible.

Okay, there are the moments for the week. I love you all! Keep happy and healthy :)

Love, 

Hermana Reynolds

another week in Laredo :)

Hello!

Well, this week was another week full of miracles and  busy times. Transfers happened on Tuesday, and my companion, Sister McArthur got transferred to another Zone and my new companion is Sister Medina - she's wonderful! We're going to have a great transfer. Today is her Birthday, and while we were outside washing the car 6 little puppies ran up to us, so we got to play with some adorable puppies to start off her birthday. It was pretty magical. 

Sister Medina came up on Tuesday evening, and then we worked together for a few hours, and then the next morning we left to McAllen for MLC and didn't get back until Friday, so most of our first week was spend in McAllen. We worked really hard in the last few days we had here, though, and had cool things happen. On Saturday night, we were walking by the house of some people who we had briefly talked to before, and they had just arrived from the store and were taking in groceries, so we helped them. They invited us in and we talked for a while, and the mother figure is this sweet woman who's 70 years old and has 10 children and 42 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren and now is taking care of 4 sweet little kids between the ages of 8-13. We invited them to church the next day and they came! The only sad thing was that yesterday was a special regional conference and the kids were a little bored, ha ha. but they're really cool so we'll see what happens from here :) 

The regional conference was really really good - it was Elder Oaks, Sister Reeves, Lynn G Robbins, and someone else. They talked a lot about repentance and change, and also about simplicity and living within our means. Good stuff :)

Sister Ingleby who lives with us is training now, so we have a greenie living in our house now, and it's really fun to think back to what it was like and how recently it feels like I was there. Pretty crazy how fast time goes. 

Well I hope your have a phenomenal week! Love you all!

M

--

Hermana Reynolds

Halloween and Other Exciting Things

Transfer #6 is over! Where is this time going???

Okay, well this week flew by. Here are some highlights:

We had an Animo fest:

In Spanish, there's this word Animo, and it's one of the "5 pillars" of our mission (which are Animo, Amor, Trabajar Duro, Obediencia, Gran Actitud). There's no English equivalent, really, and it gets pretty broadly interpreted, and a lot of times missionaries interpret it as always being really excited. So sister McArthur and I decided to focus the transfer on Animo, and discovering together what Animo means personally for all of the the sister missionaries in South Laredo. Ultimately, we decided that Animo is giving your all to the work, but in order to do that you have to understand how. So we studied about the Heart, Might, Mind and Strength, and did some small activities with that, but then at the end we decided to have an Animo Fest to end the transfer, and so we had each girl pick a Spirit Animal (since Animo and Animal are basically the same word..), and we got together and painted ourselves as that animal, and then we choreographed a little dance and recorded it. It was pretty magical, and very cool to see how everyone had grown during the transfer to understand Animo more :) 

Halloween:

So, if your question is "did you get lots of candy?" or "did people think you were trick-or-treating?", the answer is: No. We had to be inside by 6:00 pm, so nothing too crazy happened. We did dress up as each other, and we got invited to a member's home earlier in the day for Carne Asada. It was a really humbling experience - this particular member lives very close to the border in a very humble cinder-block home, and most of the flooring in dirt or cement. I'm not sure how they afforded it, but they cooked a ton of meat and had salsa and tortillas and beans, and about 10 of the missionaries and them and a few other people all had a Halloween get together. It was really beautiful to see how important it was to this member to present something to the missionaries, and how deep her love was in spite of her circumstances. The people here are really good :)

Andy came to church:

Toward the beginning of this transfer, we had a referral we were going to go contact, but as we started walking up to it we saw a big dog on the porch. There's a fine line between faith and wisdom when it comes to the dogs in Laredo.. sometimes they're nice, but more than often they're hungry. (They're also always either really big or are Chihuahuas. So. Many. Chihuahuas.)

This particular day, I wasn't feeling like giving up because of a dog, so using skills acquired from watching The Dog Whisperer, I made friends with the dog and we knocked on the door and this guy named Andy answered. He's pretty cool, but didn't have a phone and it was really hard to keep contact with him. So we had given him a book of mormon, but we kind of lost contact after that, but last week we decided to try again and we found him and he's been reading the book of mormon and he now has a working cell phone, so we've been able to teach him quite a bit, and then through a really big miracle he came to church. So that was exciting. We like it when people come to church. 

Love you all!

Love,

M

--

Hermana Reynolds